Where's My Name?

It’s now official—I have graduated from St. John’s University with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Yep, that’s it. I got my diploma in the mail over the weekend and upon opening it I was amazed to see that it didn’t have my majors on it. Almost every other diploma I’ve seen from other college puts the major/minor on the diploma, but mine just say “Bachelor of Arts”. I guess I can just tell people whatever I want to when they ask.

“So what did you graduate with?”

“A BA.”

“Sweet. In what?”

“Neurochemistry.”

“Really? Wow, that’s truly amazing.”

“Actually, dude, I was just messing with you. I really have a double major. Molecular biology AND neurochemistry.”

The only way anyone would know the difference would be to call SJU and find out or get a hold of my transcript. Maybe it’s not that big of a deal, but I was hoping that my majors would have been printed because I wanted to frame it and put it up in my office, but since SJU is so retarded and couldn’t spend an extra fifty cents to get my majors printed I’m just going to leave it in its envelope and stick it in our safe.

This weekend I was up in St. Cloud visiting Kristin. It was a fun time, all except driving through rush hour traffic on Friday afternoon, that is. I would easily become homicidal within a month if I had to deal with rush hour in the cities day in and day out. Sure, I have a 40 minute drive to and from work, but difference is I’m driving 35 miles each way and commuters in the cities are maybe covering 10 miles in the same amount of time. Eesh, I’d go nuts.

At least the drive was made bearable by listening to the audiobook of Animal Farm by George Orwell. I’ve recently picked up a bunch of audiobooks to listen while traveling to and from work and also when I make weekend trips to St. Cloud. If you haven’t read (or listened to) Animal Farm, it’s a wonderful book on the critique of the human race. Some of the metaphors may be a little far from subtle, but I was interested nonetheless.

Anyhow, while I was up in Cloud, Kristin, John, and I went to a LAN party that was being hosted on campus. I was surprised to see a good 50 or so people there. You could smell the sheer amount of dork as soon as you entered the room. As we surveyed the attendees, we noted there was exactly one woman there. By Kristin entering the room the female populace was doubled. It is simply mind-blowing how dorky some of the people that go to these things are. I guess maybe I shouldn’t poke fun since I’m pretty dorky myself, but some of the people there you know spend 95% of their waking lives in front of one type of computer screen or another.

Deciding to brave the dorkiness, John, K, and I played some Mario Kart. I don’t know if I really enjoy the Gamecube Mario Kart as much as the N64 version. It just doesn’t seem quite the same and I think by trying to add too many new ideas, they lost some of the fun there was in the N64 game. No matter how you look at it, though, it’s still a fun multiplayer game, even if I do kind of suck at it.

The rest of the weekend was spent with Kristin. It’s a lot different only getting to see each other on the weekends now as opposed to last semester where we could see each other every day, and usually did. It’ll take a little while to get adjusted to, but I’m sure it’ll be fine once we get used to it.

While finding things to do, we decided to go be mall rats for a while, like we often like to do. We made the usual stops and I even managed to snag a couple of new Xbox games—Soul Calibur II, Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes, and Brute Force. I’ve played SCII with Ryan last night and I can easily say that this is one of the coolest fighting games I have ever played. I absolutely love it and I know that it will be a $25 investment well spent.

While at the Electronics Boutique (I think that’s the name of the place) in the mall in St. Cloud, I again had to deal with the manager there who, unfortunately, shares my first name. I’ve often had to deal with him and often Kristin and I will refuse to go in the store if we see him working. He is easily one of the pushiest and most annoying salespersons we have ever met. I would never buy anything from that store again, except they had a buy 2 get 1 free sale going on.

As we were checking out, he tried to get us to buy some membership to their store. I’d get some gay-ass magazine that they publish, which is basically 50 pages of ads for games they sell, and a certain percentage off used games. I don’t want, I never had, and I never will. I told him I wasn’t interested, but he just kept pushing. It’ll only cost you $5 today because of a sale we have going on. You get this great magazine. You get money off of used games. You’ll easily make your money back.

It’s so simple and rewarding. NO NO NO!!! I don’t want your damn membership so stop asking. The only way I’d ever sign up and pay for their membership is if he promised to impale himself with the barcode scanner they had behind the desk and then let me take a dump on his dead body.