Maypocalypse Now

Fact: Over the past two years, I have updated the English Muffin Power Hour at random intervals. Yet none of them ever occurred in the month of May. Why?

First and foremost, May is the shortest month of the year, in terms of the number of letters. You might think that it's a petty and trivial reason, but I've never let that stop me before. It's just impossible to respect a month that refuses to use so much of the alphabet. Second, MTSU does a fantastic job of demanding I write as many papers as possible at the end of the semester so the last thing I want to do. Also, the first half of the month is basically the End of the Days. Between finals, moving out, moving in, unpacking, and fending off wolves with my bare hands (although bear hands would make it easier), I consider myself lucky to have all my limbs intact this time of year. Most importantly, since all of my friends are equally exhausted by this point in the year, it means no one has the energy to leave town for an extended period of time. In my brain trust alone, I will have friends visiting California, Alaska, Belgium, South Africa, and the very center of the Earth starting in June. So I figure it's better to hang out with them before they get carried off to the sea by crabs/tricked by hippies/be appointed Duchess of Waffles/held hostage by the Prawn Aliens/become king of the mole people. In fact, despite my every intention to update this month, this is my third attempt at this post

Unfortunately, it seems as though justifying a lack of content is not quite as entertaining as actual content. So I figure I'll talk a bit about some of the many adventures I have been the last post.

Graduation: It's hard to believe that I'm a college graduate. Maybe I had raised my expectations too high, but I was a bit disappointed by my diploma after I picked it up. It was a very nice sheet of paper and it came with a lovely case/coaster (that reminds me, I need to go frame shopping later). Personally, I expected the diploma to descend from the heavens carried by the most majestic gryphons in the land, illuminated by a single ray of light that parts the gray clouds, lettered in gold on a diploma carved from platinum and a case embroidered with mithril. What else could I have been working towards over the past 18 years of education? The ceremony itself was another story. The events leading up to the ceremony were panicky and chaotic even by my standards.

But first, a little explanation is required. For the second year in a row, the RA on my floor ingloriously abandoned ship with less than six weeks left in the semester, which meant I was responsible for checking out a floor of freshman. Then the Nashville Flood delayed my Monday night exam to Friday night, which meant I was still giving scholarly presentations with 18 hours before graduation. The net result of all this was I had no time to set out an outfit for graduation. I was one well placed packed box away from having an Angus Young look; I had remembered my dress shirt but could not find any dress pants and had to make do with shorts. Fortunately for the integrity of both Graduation and AC/DC, I found a pair of long pants in a box I had in my car and got to graduation a mere half hour after I was supposed to (Depressing Fact: I still was not near the last person to show up).

The actual ceremony itself was another story. The whole thing was delayed by thirty minutes because the earlier graduation didn't get done in a timely fashion. I feel like MTSU's graduation classes are getting big enough that we should really have three graduation ceremonies: Friday night, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon. Then we wouldn't have to try to get through 2,000 names in an hour and a half. But I digress. There were three types of graduates attending the ceremony: graduates who were listening to their iPods, graduates who were texting, and graduates who were bored not only out of their minds, but out of their souls. My iPod was MIA since March through circumstances that I still do not understand to this very day, and I had left my cell phone in the car (though I don't know if that was intentional or the byproduct of the Pants Frenzy). Thus, I was bored out of my soul. Dr. McPhee gave a good speech about how MTSU is awesome and is continuing to enhance its awesomeness department. However, the commencement speaker was a complete failure. His speech had no purpose beyond "be brief" and it failed in that regard. They say that you will not remember the commencement speech years later but I didn't remember it later that day.

The oddest part was the person who announced the graduates from the College of Liberal Arts. Ominously, she started the list by calling it the "College of Liberial (sic) Arts". Sure, she corrected herself, but I think it’s unacceptable for any professor to not understand how the name of their college is pronounced. Additionally, she could pronounce a name like "Kwame Deshontrius N!xau" but mispronounced Buchanan (she pronounced in Buck-han-an). Maybe she decided she would mix it up to see if anyone was paying attention.

However, despite my myriad of complaints, it was a truly overwhelming experience to see that the educational war had, at long last, come to an end for me. After nearly twenty years of notes, tests, papers, presentations, and exams, it had all come to a glorious end. And I'll be darned if I didn't feel proud of it, gryphons or not.

Next time: Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, and Misadventures in Biking