Officially Official

Officially an MA, that is.

Can you tell that the hood's choking me a bit? My gown didn't have the button it was supposed to have on the front to attach the hood to. Those things are heavy!

If you didn't surmise this, I finally graduated Saturday. I say finally because I feel like I've been done for a long time. I turned in my thesis in December, but I took my last class a year ago. Of course, I still haven't received my diploma. But I guess that's what you get with a state school going through major budget cuts.

A couple of rows ahead of me during the ceremony was a woman who had brought her 4-year-old son into the ceremony with her. She had somehow procured him a miniature purple robe and cap! He was adorable. I had to stop and be grateful that I did not have a child yet while working through grad school. And mad props to any single mom (this woman was young enough that I made the perhaps incorrect assumption that she was single and had gotten knocked up as a teenager) who gets a degree of any kind with young kids.

The speakers were...graduation speakers. They spoke many words that sounded inspiring, I'm not sure what they actually said that had any substance. You earned this? You deserve this? Go live your dreams? Please. And sorry for the cynicism. I heard Oprah speak at a graduation once and was only slightly impressed by her, so I'm not the one to ask for opinions on these kinds of things.

But I am happy to have jumped the final hurdle in my education. I think I'm done with school for a little while. I'm sure I'll be back again someday for something. I'm a bit of an education addict. But for now, I'm enjoying the fact that I'm sitting here and blogging on a Sunday afternoon rather than writing pages and pages about John Donne.

Oh, and the best part of this graduation? The gift I received from my very generous in-laws: a Kindle. In general, I do not own very many gadgets. I still have an old-school cell phone and am typing on a ten-year-old laptop. But what gadget could be better suited to an English MA graduate than a Kindle?