At Oxford, we take the matriculation ceremony SERIOUSLY. I mean, you can skip the 300-person lectures, and no one will notice. Students are almost encouraged to miss a tutorial once or twice a year. But there's one thing you don't miss, and that's the Latin-imbued ceremony that allows you to be an official member of the University of Oxford, followed by the infamous class photo (featured prominently in the recent awesome movie The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo Decapitated). You just don't.
Before I left King's, I played a featured role in the school musical "Where's Charley?" about some slacker Oxford lads and their weird relatives. There's an almost-famous scene at the beginning of Act 2 when everyone's singing, wondering where Charley is, because they're about to take the class photo. Charley comes running in at the end of the number, breaking the fourth wall, and just makes it into the photo. But, in the same way as with the pronunciation of "Ashmolean" and "conservatory," that musical showed its ignorance of Oxford in its treatment of this ancient(ish) tradition. If everything else is taken for granted, the matriculation ceremony and photo are the two things that cannot be taken for granted.
So imagine how I felt when my alarm didn't go off this morning, and I woke up at 11:17, with the matriculation ceremony to start at 11:30.
As swiftly as I could, I changed into subfusc, and went charging out into the streets. I asked the first person I saw where matriculation was, and he said the examination schools, and so I sprinted there as fast as I could. No one was there.
I instantly demanded from the closest person where it was, and they told me they thought it would be at my own college. I sprinted back to Oriel as fast as I could, my shiny shoes getting completely messed up. No one was theeeeeere.
I asked the porter, where is it?! Where is the matriculation ceremony?!! He told me Radcliffe Camera. I sprinted across the road (although I did check both ways first), and made it just in time to the Sheldonian Theatre (which is near the Radcliffe).
I got there just in time to see the last few people from Oriel entering the theatre. I asked the man, and he let me in. I saw all but the first minute of the ceremony (probably just something boring and Latin).
But wait! I wasn't registered! I was supposed to register before we all went over! The kind woman who did the registering added my name to the list when I explained. But wait!! I wasn't in subfusc! I was wearing my Oriel tie instead of my white bow tie!! I had just enough time between the ceremony and the picture to sprint back over and up to my room to fetch the bow tie and sprint back just before the picture.
Phew. Complete and utter disaster narrowly averted.
B tee dubs (btw), here's a picture taken with my "college sister" (who, like everyone else in my blog, while remain nameless, but not necessarily faceless). This is our awkward fake-family Christmas card photo.
I didn't get much work done today, but that's because this week has been a seriously stressful week. I've had to do a ton of walking, since I currently have lectures in two faraway buildings in the morning and in the afternoon, meaning I can't work on homework at either times of the day (though that will change later this week, thankfully).
Also, on the day I was going to sleep in and recover some sleep, we had the fire alarm go off at 7:00. It was a fire drill. Apparently it's mandated by law in England for all unis (universities) to do them at random times like that and get as close as possible to an ideal three-minute evacuation. Apparently our seven-minute evacuation didn't make the cut, because half an hour after I'd returned to my room and gone back to bed after standing out in the cold half-awake wearing shorts for fifteen minutes, the fire alarm went off again. This time it was a false alarm, but my first thought as I heard that insanely loud alarm go off was, "They really do hate us!"
Adding to things, I've missed three lectures this week; one because they got the Maths and CompSci lecture list timetable wrong with a small yet significant typo, one because it conflicted with a tutorial, and one because I forgot to write it down in my planner (my new best friend; call him Steve, the Man with a Plan). And an ill-timed lecture made it so that I missed half of a rehearsal for choir, meaning that that night I performed without having learned half the music.
And then, as some of you know, something dreadful happened on Monday.
The point is, I've been going out of my mind this week, so it was very important that I take an afternoon and not spend it entirely on work. Now I've got that out of the way, I can finish those three problem sheets tomorrow with a bit of elbow grease and spit and polish and whatever other disgusting-sounding thing I need that implies hard work.
I'm sorry I haven't been updating the blog recently, but now you know why.
Tardily,
John Khouri, an Oxford Man
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