Monster in a Box

(with apologies to Spalding Gray...)

(...and to you, my six readers. This is a long self-referential post of which Anonymous will heartily disapprove.)

SO: This morning I finally hightailed it over to my ertswhile grad school and registered my thesis with the appropriate authorities.

I finished it in April. Had it signed the first time around in April. Had it returned by the Dean's Office with fixable but annoying errors in early May. Took till the end of June to return it, with new signatures, to the Dean. By that time I'd gone through commencement with my spiffing blue robes and mortarboard, had been hired elsewhere to teach college, and had also been alerted that I wasn't, strictly speaking, a master of anything.

Well, I could have told them that.

Bad things happened in late July and early August. But I have no excuses for those first two weeks in July. This could have gotten resolved a long, long time ago.

So when I got a letter August 12 (an especially bad day for me anyway) saying I'd have to now pay to matriculate as well as resubmit my thesis, was I surprised?

Nah. It's the way I've let my summer go. For the record, I also haven't yet removed the trash bags from my garden as reported July 31.

There. Now you know everything.

Anyway. When I presented myself today, some things went right. First, the Cashier accepted my credit card. That's a plus in any transaction I undertake.

Then, I actually saw the individual who wrote me the August 12 letter of bad news. You've gotta love small universities. And summer sessions. And diminutive, kind-faced women who have worked in the Registrar's Office for years and seen it all.

She led me through a long warren of houseplant-infested hallways to her desk, past the inevitable Desk-of-the-Jesus-Loving Colleague whose sign, this time, read "I Keep the Love of the Lord in My Heart and Don't Worry About Anything!!!!!!!!!!!"

A clear case of denial, if you ask me. Why all the exclamation points?

Where was I?

Oh yes. With a wave of her slim and probably perfumed little paw, my new friend in the Registrar's Office made the bad dream go away. "Oh," she said, "You will graduate this summer. We were just wondering about you."

That makes more than one of us.

I'm already wishing I had brought my camera, because there was the perfect illustration therein, buried in an area of the Registrar's Office I will never be permitted to enter again. It was a plain closet marked 'Utility,' to the nameplate of which someone had added a simple black 'F.'

I know, I know. Words don't do it justice. Maybe I can arrange to have my thesis rejected somehow, just to be allowed back there again...

categories: amusement life miscellany words