Today, Maddy, my youngest daughter, graduated from High School. I was asked if I'd like to deliver the address, but declined. I wanted to be a dad, and sit in the audience with my family and beam proudly, and wander around taking photographs afterwards of Maddy and all her friends. And that's what I did. It was great.
When I started this blog, she was six.
I love you Maddy Gaiman, and am so proud of you.
Soon there will be nothing keeping me in the midwest except inertia, and this is where my stuff is. And my bees. I'm hoping to spend more time on the West Coast with my two older children, and much much much more time on the East Coast with my wife, when she finishes her 2013 world tour, at any rate.
In the meantime, I'm reposting this cartoon. You'll need to click on it to read it at its home page, as the way Blogger software is set up these days does not agree with it, and I can't get it readable here. It's from http://zenpencils.com/comic/50-neil-gaiman-make-good-art/ It's by Gavin Aung Than, and I hope I get to thank him personally for doing it the next time I'm in Melbourne. He's taken a bit from the middle of my UArts commencement speech and made it into a comic.
The speech has been, I was bewildered to learn, viewed over 335,000 times on Vimeo, and is now captioned in English, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish at http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/IOH3jJ6INIof/info/neil-gaiman-addresses-the-university-of-the-arts-class-of-2012/ . It's still in its original vanilla form at http://vimeo.com/42372767. And it's even crept onto YouTube -- which may be useful for people in countries that have blocked Vimeo.
Labels: Maddy, Maddy Graduates, make good art