Graduation Blues

I officially graduated last night.

The ceremony started at 7:30 at night, so we planned to leave the house at 5:30 to get there a little early to find parking and good seats. But, as usual, the sister took too long getting ready, and dad took a while too, so we ended up leaving the house at 6:00. I guess I should've known that if we'd wanted to actually leave at 5:30, we should have made plans to leave at 5:00.

When we were about a mile away from the house already, I freaked out. "Is my hat there?" I asked the folks at the backseat. "Yes, I brought it," my dad answered. "Is the tassle there?" I asked. After a few seconds of rummaging through the backseat, the answer came: "No." Shit! We have to go back! Another delay.

This little detour didn't take long, maybe five minutes, but we were already running late--parking would be hard to find. But we made our way, slowly but surely. My pants began to vibrate. It was a school buddy calling. "Where are you?" he asked me. "I'm on my way," I replied. "You should have been here half an hour ago for the group photo," he informed me. What can I do, right? So I said, "Oh, well, as long as I get to join the ceremony."

Five minutes later, my phone was vibrating again. Same buddy. "Where are you?" "270," I said. "Oh, God," he said. Things were starting to sound bad. "They don't have you on the list. They want to talk to you. How long will it take you to get here?" I looked at the GPS. 24 minutes, it told me. "About half an hour," I told him. "Just try to get here as soon as you can. I'm putting your name down, but they still want to talk to you."

Maybe twenty minutes later, my phone vibrates a third time. "Where are you?" My buddy asked. "I'm stuck in Georgetown." "Oh, God, you passed Georgetown?! You should have taken the freeway." At this point I was rather frustrated with the GPS which wasn't giving us the directions we wanted. We knew which roads we wanted to take, but we jut didn't know how to get to those roads, and we were hoping that the GPS would tell us. Piece of shit. I was also passing the blame on to my sister, who I made drive, because she's always talking about DC streets with such authority. She has said things like, "______ leads to Dupont Circle," and "M Street" this and that. But as we made our way to school, it started to dawn on me that she was not as familiar with the city as I'd believed she was. Crap.

But eventually we got to school and I just ran into the prep area where I found my friends seated, togas and hats on, ready to head over to the ceremony. So I signed up quickly and joined them. Clearly, the drive up there did not have to be as stressful as it was. All I needed was two minutes to sign up and get my toga on. I did so, and not long after that, we grads began to make our way to the basketball stadium.

As we were lined up outside the stadium, my phone rang. It was my sister. "You were joking us. You got an award." I had told them earlier that I wasn't getting an award. And I really thought I wasn't. "That's news to me. What award?" "The tugfjdkv Award." "Tugfjdkv" is how I hear unusual names when I'm unprepared to hear them. "It's the highest award," my sister told me.

So we sat down, and there was a lot of blah, bah, blah. Then they began calling out cum laudes, asking them to rise as they were called. They called my name. Wow, I thought. No one told me I was cum laude. So I stood up. Then I sat down and then the magnas and summas were called. Then they called out the individual student awards. "Blah, blah, blah, the Benjamin T. Cruickshanks Award blah, blah, blah, graduating senior with the highest academic standard in their major, blah, blah, blah, for civil and environmental engineering..." There was a pause, and the folks giving the awards onstage began to confer with each other. Then, "for computer science..." Hang on! They should have called me for civil! That was my award they were not giving me. Maybe I could've gotten some poon for that (probably not though)!

Long story short, they thought I wasn't there. I had no plans to attend graduation until very recently, and word hadn't gotten out that I was actually there. It worked out in a weird way. I was supposed to have a special seat onstage to receive my award. But since I signed up to graduate very late, I ended up in the very crowded regular seats and would not have been able to claim my award onstage without climbing over the chair in front of me or making half the people in my row stand up to let me through, either way kind of ruining the order of the ceremony.

Okay, I figured. Just get my award later on. No big deal. Then it was the dean of the civil department's, Dr. Roddis, turn to hand out special awards for the civil kids. But she didn't walk straight up to the podium. She first went to the table with all the awards laid out on it and talked to the people there. Then she walked up to the podium and said, "First of all, Richard Sandoval received the Benjamin T. Cruickshanks award for civil engineering and I would like to ask Richard to stand up and be recognized." So I stood up, and a photographer with a big camera took a photo of me. It was pretty surreal, and I didn't even notice if people applauded. I'm guessing they did. Anyway, I thought it was nice of Dr. Roddis to have noticed that I was there and to call me out like that. When I went on stage with all the other grads to get the medal they give all the grads, I shook Dr. Roddis' hand and she said, "I have something extra for you. Sorry for the mix-up." I replied--rather vaguely, I imagine--"Oh, no, I was late."

So eventually, the ceremony ended, and the family went to Ruby Tuesday to celebrate. I chose that, becaue it wasn't too expensive and we (my family) were treating a lot of people. It felt kind of weird being eating there with a tie on.