For obvious reasons, I can’t get “Pomp and Circumstance” out of my head.
Da… da da da, da… da. Da…. da da da, da.
Whirlwind graduation tour – Part Two
The nice thing about sleeping back home is that I don’t have to set an alarm, I just tell my mom to wake me. I know that if I get up after the second time she comes it and tells me it’s time to wake up, that gives me just enough time to do my morning thing and be ready at the same time as everyone else.
It’s a good thing, too, because I was awoken at 6:30 a.m. Sunday morning. As the designated driver, I got to drive the three of us to UCLA in my mom’s car, with my Uncle and Aunt in the car behind us. The trip was uneventful, except for the fact that I got to see some of the construction projects that had been started when I was still living in SoCal actually finished (the 57/91 interchange and the 5/91 interchange) along with some brand new construction. We manage to only make about one wrong turn that was easily correctable, drive past Scott and pick him up off of the street, park the car, and walk to the open field where his graduation is going to take place. We get there a little after 8am for the ceremony that starts at 10am. UCLA’s commencements are a bit more like Berkeley’s than UCR’s, though. They split it up by school/department, and have multiple ceremonies in multiple places over the course of a few days. We attended the Physical Sciences ceremony of the College of Letters and Science, which was large enough that the Chancellor attended. The stark contrast of the students, not to mention the crowd, compared to UCR’s ceremony was striking. Where I felt overdressed on Saturday, I definitely felt underdressed on Sunday, and I was wearing nicer pants on Sunday (heh)! There were quite a few more Doctorates, nowhere near as many Masters Degrees, and a fraction of the Bachelor’s Degrees. The difference that allowed us to be done in an hour an a half was that they didn’t actually walk across the stage. The Doctorates got hooded individually, but everyone else just stood up in place were recognized as a group.
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Whirlwind graduation tour
Here comes another long one… my weekend. I went down to Southern California for a variety of reasons which will become apparent as the weekend unfolds in this entry.
I could start at Friday night, with Friday Night Magic, but that was a typical Friday. The fun really began Saturday morning at 9am.
Waking up at 9am is sort of early for me, but bearable. But having to wake myself up, “pack” (I only had to bring enough clothes for one night and my toiletries), and get to the airport. Of course, I forgot I had to get gas first, so by the time I got to the airport, I was running late enough that I didn’t want to risk missing my flight and parked in short term parking instead of long term parking. It was only going to be for about 30 hours so it wouldn’t be that bad. I am one of the last to check in, but I make it before the 5 minute rule (yay Southwest).
On the flight I try to play some GBA Castlevania, but the amount of time that you get on the 50 minute flight that isn’t ascent or decent and they aren’t serving drinks is about 15 minutes, so I didn’t get much in. That, and the whole light issue made it hard to play. Also, I felt very weird, as the young woman who was sitting next to me was sobbing uncontrollably (and unapproachably) for most of the flight. I never found out why, but it did cause me to think quite a bit about it. I had another one of those “weird intersections in people’s lives” moment. But of course it didn’t last long, because we landed in Ontario before too long. About the time that they said that we could turn on our cell phones when we had reached the gate, I realized that I had left mine on the whole trip. Oops. I’m glad I didn’t make the airplane crash or something.
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