July 13th -- Put a Cork In It
Okay, that's just the wine talking. Put a FORK in it. That's the expression. I have the sheepskin. Let's call it a degree.
A good and a hard day.
The culmination of several weeks of hard work and several dozen others of being bored out of my skull and wondering why I had the Appalachians between me and my family to learn about leadership principles UH-gain or Macroeconomics for the second and hopefully last friggin time.
The 10 o'clock awards ceremony was a little frustrating -- I knew I didn't have the grades for Distinguished Graduate, but I still wished character counted for something, as my least favorite classmate, a dork with the personality of a stale muffin, had been selected DG. It was based solely on those getting a 4.0. I learned the next day that someone had actually dropped out of a class after getting an A- on the midterm, and then retaken the class the next term in order to keep his 4.0 intact. Now THAT's ambition. DG was nice out of SOS, but I was more thrilled to receive my "outstanding contributor" certificates, voted on by my flight mates. I had half-heartedly hoped on sneaking in under the radar, that the faculty saw more in me than my lack of grasp of the National Savings Rate.
Still, as I stewed with my 3.92 GPA and wondered the what if's, I began to get more and more upset at myself. I had all but promised Ainsley I would get DG, as a sort of justification for being separated for 13 months. I even put myself in for a volunteer service award, just so she could be somewhat proud of me, see me go up to the stage once, but that organization gave the award to its outgoing president, who had been at AFIT for 3 years (had I known he was eligible, that a guy was supposed to compete with one year's service with someone else who had 3, I wouldn't have bothered).
Of course, Ainsley could care less about accolades and cannot stop telling me how proud she and Ryan are of me. It was still hard to see the worth in it all. Not in the education, but the separation. Everything she had had to do by herself over the preceding year suddenly hit me over the head like a waterfall, as our little boy smiled at me from the center of the fold-out sofa bed.
We had to report at 6 in order to be briefed on how to line-up and walk in to the hangar, and it was kind of a cluster. 200 people with nary a care in the world are not going to pay much attention to your overhead projector show, pal. I tried my best to provide the most sarcastic comic relief I could, as -- stop me if you've heard this before -- is my nature. But when the guy says that General Fogleman is going to present the top graduate with an award and the slide reads "The winner will wait till his/her name is called, cross the stage, and shake hands with Gen Fogleman while he gives you the plague", someone has to point that out.
More of the same in the main auditorium, as a typical graduation ceremony ensued; each name called one by one, a smattering of applause from the back from those that knew said graduate. A few of us applauded for each, but we had comments for a lot of folks as their names were read off (such as when Manuel's name was pronounced "man-u-al").
"Major Ralph E. Patterson, the Fourth." "That's an awful lot of Ralphs." "It is."
"Major Earl W. Jaworski." (Me, in my best Jason Lee accent): "Mah name is Earl." (When you get into the second hundred set of names, anything sounds funny.)
"PhD candidate Capt Nathan P. Sherman. His dissertation, Analysis and Control Of Unreliable, Single-Server Retrial Queues with Infinite-Capacity Orbit and Normal Queue, says that by extending basic results in retrial queuing theory, one can mathematically characterize congestion measures and the impact of failures on system performance." "Yeah, well, I did a book report on 'Coors'."
A few handshakes at the end, and I was done. Later on, my wife asked if I had made any friends here, and it was hard to say. I would love to work with some of these folks again, and probably will. But as I wrapped up my computer files the next day and copied some WBLS, banquet, and Graduation photos to my thumb drive, it occurred to me that I never once considered bringing my camera to any of these events, and no one really asked me to join them in their group shots, either. Shy, independent, aloof, indifferent...hard to say. My standard and valid answer is that fun is no fun without my wife around. I wasn't 'me' in Dayton. I was a ghost, with heart and mind 500 miles away. Perhaps people sensed that.
"You have two Masters," my wife said softly.
...'too many, more like,' I thought.
A good and a hard day.
The culmination of several weeks of hard work and several dozen others of being bored out of my skull and wondering why I had the Appalachians between me and my family to learn about leadership principles UH-gain or Macroeconomics for the second and hopefully last friggin time.
The 10 o'clock awards ceremony was a little frustrating -- I knew I didn't have the grades for Distinguished Graduate, but I still wished character counted for something, as my least favorite classmate, a dork with the personality of a stale muffin, had been selected DG. It was based solely on those getting a 4.0. I learned the next day that someone had actually dropped out of a class after getting an A- on the midterm, and then retaken the class the next term in order to keep his 4.0 intact. Now THAT's ambition. DG was nice out of SOS, but I was more thrilled to receive my "outstanding contributor" certificates, voted on by my flight mates. I had half-heartedly hoped on sneaking in under the radar, that the faculty saw more in me than my lack of grasp of the National Savings Rate.
Still, as I stewed with my 3.92 GPA and wondered the what if's, I began to get more and more upset at myself. I had all but promised Ainsley I would get DG, as a sort of justification for being separated for 13 months. I even put myself in for a volunteer service award, just so she could be somewhat proud of me, see me go up to the stage once, but that organization gave the award to its outgoing president, who had been at AFIT for 3 years (had I known he was eligible, that a guy was supposed to compete with one year's service with someone else who had 3, I wouldn't have bothered).
Of course, Ainsley could care less about accolades and cannot stop telling me how proud she and Ryan are of me. It was still hard to see the worth in it all. Not in the education, but the separation. Everything she had had to do by herself over the preceding year suddenly hit me over the head like a waterfall, as our little boy smiled at me from the center of the fold-out sofa bed.
We had to report at 6 in order to be briefed on how to line-up and walk in to the hangar, and it was kind of a cluster. 200 people with nary a care in the world are not going to pay much attention to your overhead projector show, pal. I tried my best to provide the most sarcastic comic relief I could, as -- stop me if you've heard this before -- is my nature. But when the guy says that General Fogleman is going to present the top graduate with an award and the slide reads "The winner will wait till his/her name is called, cross the stage, and shake hands with Gen Fogleman while he gives you the plague", someone has to point that out.
More of the same in the main auditorium, as a typical graduation ceremony ensued; each name called one by one, a smattering of applause from the back from those that knew said graduate. A few of us applauded for each, but we had comments for a lot of folks as their names were read off (such as when Manuel's name was pronounced "man-u-al").
"Major Ralph E. Patterson, the Fourth." "That's an awful lot of Ralphs." "It is."
"Major Earl W. Jaworski." (Me, in my best Jason Lee accent): "Mah name is Earl." (When you get into the second hundred set of names, anything sounds funny.)
"PhD candidate Capt Nathan P. Sherman. His dissertation, Analysis and Control Of Unreliable, Single-Server Retrial Queues with Infinite-Capacity Orbit and Normal Queue, says that by extending basic results in retrial queuing theory, one can mathematically characterize congestion measures and the impact of failures on system performance." "Yeah, well, I did a book report on 'Coors'."
A few handshakes at the end, and I was done. Later on, my wife asked if I had made any friends here, and it was hard to say. I would love to work with some of these folks again, and probably will. But as I wrapped up my computer files the next day and copied some WBLS, banquet, and Graduation photos to my thumb drive, it occurred to me that I never once considered bringing my camera to any of these events, and no one really asked me to join them in their group shots, either. Shy, independent, aloof, indifferent...hard to say. My standard and valid answer is that fun is no fun without my wife around. I wasn't 'me' in Dayton. I was a ghost, with heart and mind 500 miles away. Perhaps people sensed that.
"You have two Masters," my wife said softly.
...'too many, more like,' I thought.
posted by Dan at 9:20 PM
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