Convocation

Today was my convocation! My grandparents, my mother, my brother, and a friend all came to watch me walk across the stage.

It wasn't held at the college, so I had to take a 2 hour bus ride to get there. On my last of three buses, a friend texted me saying we had to be in line half an hour before the stated time. I was going to get off the bus 40 minutes ahead of time, but this news gave me 10, and since it's still a bit of a hike to get to the destination, I thought I'd have to sprint it. But almost as soon as I got out, an SSW peer swung by in a car and motioned me to get in.

When I got there, I received a call, which I didn't think was possible because I'd put it in Airplane Mode (an idea that occurred to me after my phone decided to delete half my contacts again and put it in Airplane Mode). Turns out, my phone had called Emergency Services. I was worried they were going to send a crew over and crash convocation, but they didn't because they made voice contact with me. I turned my phone off for the ceremony. My contacts later came back.

When I did the ceremony in HSF, we all wore these sashes called liripipes over our shoulders and everyone had trouble keeping them on. I remember I felt greatly accomplished at balancing my liripipe flawlessly. This time around, nobody dropped a liripipe or even seemed to struggle. I wondered if they modified them in some way to make them easier to balance. I noticed they had ridges, and wondered if the HSF liripipes had ridges or if this was the modification that made the difference.

Remember how I said that the Registrar's Office had me down as Gryphon Sibbald Sibbald, and that because of this, my HSF certificate said "Gryphon S. Sibbald". When I went into the office, the receptionist was very defensive, as if I was calling blame on her, even though I know that were there some sort of mistake, it would very likely not be the cause of the random receptionist that happened to be working in the Registrar's Office when I went to talk about the issue. She countered by being the first to allocate blame, saying that I must have filled out the form wrong, because the office doesn't make mistakes.

Well afterwards, my Student Portal and other academic systems would always address me as Gryphon Walter Barent, when it used to just call me Gryphon. I only realized the implication of this when we all got our name cards and was shown as "Gryphon Walter Barent Sibbald" while everyone else got "first name, middle initial, last name" format. That receptionist who'd gone out of her way to be antagonistic and to flaunt the infallibility of the Registrar's Office had put my first name as "Gryphon Walter Barent". That's why all the systems that would address me by my first name started calling me by first and middle.

My program coordinator asked me how I wanted to called on-stage. I said Gryphon Sibbald was fine. She told me she'd call me whatever I chose. I told her to say the full name.

In HSF, the played us out with an orchestral take of Bad Romance. If they played an orchestral version of a pop song this time around, I wasn't able to identify it.