Take Me Home Country Roads

Wow, guys. Grad week. Outstanding. Here are some things that have happened thus far:

• Erin came back from some sort of barren island where she apparently works to save a kind of bird that is like a seagull but more prone to dying.
• I went to a barbecue with an open bar. All of the drinks were free. I got lots of drinks as a result. I thought it would be cool to have one of each of the different kinds they had available. They had like seven or eight kinds available. This was disastrous.
• Ran into one Caroline Gaston at the Ward Room. She told me she had brought people with her. She was giving me their real names but then I asked for their livejournal usernames, as I was more likely to know them through that. So she named them all and damned if I didn’t know every single one of them. This was a very weird moment where technology and the real-world collided into a weird soup of reality, subreality and surreality. I got scared!
• But then Caroline drew a picture of a Snake on a Plane on my pub crawl shirt and it looked like a really happy snake just hanging out on the top of a plane. So I was happy too.
• I went out and had breakfast and walked around the city a bunch including through the park where the ducks paddle about and tip themselves upside down in the water and sleep with their heads buried deep into their bodies. I will miss these ducks and Halifax.
• I went and got a long dark cloak which I will wear tomorrow to signify that I am a graduate. It is fur-lined and majestic. If I were to steal this cloak, it would cost me two-hundred-and-fifty dollars. I will not steal this cloak.
• Erin and I sat on a bench and had ice cream and fries and diet coke and then created elaborate backstories for the other people in the park. This was really fun and inspiring for some weird reason. Seriously, it inspired me. To something. I am not sure what yet.
• I just got back from the grad rehearsal. I expected this to be, like, a walk-through of the events of the graduation ceremony. Where to stand, when to sit, how to accept your degree, and etcetera. Instead we sat in a church while people sort of made-up how the graduation ceremony would go. We applauded a lot, because King’s people applaud a lot. Seriously, we’d applaud if a guy went to the front of the room and told us that due to dangerous radiation levels on campus we all probably had cancer. We’d commend his speaking ability and compare his diction to that of Thomas Hobbes.

Tomorrow: I graduate university. I will pretend to be Batman in my black cloak-thing only briefly, as this is a dignified event. I will sit on the side of the church reserved for arts graduates, sneering at the overachievers on the science side. I will walk across a stage, stand in front of a man who will swat me with his hat, turn and accept my degree from the University’s President with a firm handshake, pause for the photo, turn to the video camera, and then my parents, and sort of shrug in a I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-happened kind of fashion. Because, seriously, I don’t. I do not.

Then I’ll dance. Much later, I mean. I will not dance in the church.

Matt