Living with a Covert Ops Hippie

College commencement speeches, regardless of who you have deliver them, often carry many of the same tired old clichés for seniors in poorly-ventilated nylon tablecloths to take in with all the enthusiasm of a rock. It’s not the seniors’ fault; hearing about the long journey they’ve taken or it being time to enter the real world is trite before they even hit the poor acoustics of their university’s basketball gymnasium. At the same time, I’m not suggesting there should be a revolutionary change in the oratory comfort zone that is the graduation speech, either. It’s a rite of passage, just as much as the post-diploma handshake, the mortar board cap launch, and the 45-minute mulling about session as newly minted grads try and locate loved ones in the stands is.

But hey, maybe some pyrotechnics would add something.

So yes, you’ve entered the real world, much as the 2nd runner-up in the ’96 Republican primary said you would. It’s been a whole 5 years since that speech, and you’ve done other clichéd things like jumping in with both feet and hitting the ground running. Perhaps your travels and your career path have taken you far, far away from your collegiate home in Williamsburg, Virginia. Maybe you did grad school or got married. Hell, you may have even had a kid. And with the crazy home sales market, you’ve probably hopped from apartment to apartment to apartment with little regard for updating your contacts and address books.

But remember, Alma Mater is watching.

The bastion of knowledge at which you spent 4 years likes to know where its children end up once they leave the nest. The reasons for this are as varied as the paths each graduate takes with his or her life. Some colleges like to know where you to hit you up for some cash once you’ve gone into the real world and made a financial killing. Others like to send your alumni magazines that really no one reads other than the 3 inches of text dedicated to your class’ notes in the back.

(Note: This, too, is a waste of time. It’s just a listing of the section editor’s friends who got married since the last release. So if you aren’t the section editor and you didn’t invite him to your wedding, you’re probably not going to get any press for it. That’s okay – we hear he gives copies of the alumni magazine as a wedding gift, anyway.)

One other reason that your alma mater likes to keep tabs on you is to send you information regarding historic homecomings that end in 5 or 0, most often signifying that word that everybody loves: REUNION! Yes, come back and show off how awesome you are to the classmates you haven’t talked to since! Bring your pretty wife! Dress up your adorable children! Rent a sweet car from Enterprise and fool ‘em!

This past week, I received a brochure for all the things W&M are planning to bring home the Class of 2002 in style. But in order to do so, they want to make sure that they let EVERYBODY in the Class of 2002 in on the party. That’s where their crack team at Alumni Services comes into play. Alumni Services is a clever surveillance op that stops at nothing, thanks to the power of the Internet, to find out where each graduate has landed, five years after scattering to the wind. Of course, this is a public university and therefore, is constrained to a state budget (at least it’s not Pennsylvania’s budget.) So some graduates have slipped through the cracks.

78 out of 1,304, to be exact. 6 per cent's not that bad.

But still, there are 78 nomads out in the world. 78 souls that have become such free spirits that their own alma mater can’t even find them. In a world of internet, e-mail, Facebook, alumni organizations, academic departmental newsletters, student organizations, blogs, these 78 people have fallen off the grid. They’ve become the dreamer minstrels of our generation – those who can’t be bothered with names and numbers and forwarding addresses. They live to be free of all that. Or maybe they've become top secret spies in other lands, damn near impossible to unearth.

Well, I’m ready to do my part, Alma Mater. For I have located one of these special ops free spirits. Yes, she’s been on the run, but it’s time to come to justice. For on your list of missing people, I have found number 52:

KATHERINE PRETZ

And all this time, I thought she really was an elementary school teacher.