Well this past weekend was somewhat of a debacle. (I'm a little late in getting this entry written, I know.)

Let me start off by going back to Thursday and we'll work up from there. I finished all my exams on Wednesday, so Thursday was kind of a day of rest and maybe a little bit of packing. I had to move from my campus apartment to a dorm because the apartments aren't open to students over the summer. The room I was supposed to move in to was just about 300 yards down the road, so not a long move, but I have a lot of stuff to move. Luckily I signed up for a private room, because Aaron (my old roommate) can't move into his new apartment for another week, so my room ended up being his storage shed for another week. I thought I was gonna be cramped for space with just my stuff (which it really wouldn't have been too bad) because this dorm room is about half the size of the apartment, but now with most of his stuff and all my stuff, its kinda cozy in here. You can't see the other half of my room on the webcam, but take my word for it, its packed. And the best part is, we get to move it all again next weekend whenever he gets back in town.

Ok, I kinda got off track there... back to Thursday. Rachel and I had lunch on Thursday. We'd both been busy the past few weeks and had missed our Saturday lunches and she skipped church ;-) so I hadn't seen her in a while. Little did I know this was going to be the last time I'd get to see her. I knew she wasn't planning to stick around long after graduation on Saturday, but I was still hoping to find her afterwards and say goodbye. (More to come about Saturday and graduation later on.) So now she's gone, not quite sure how to handle that. Hopefully she'll be online every so often and we can keep in touch.
The rest of friday was pretty uneventful. I found out I wouldn't be able to move into my new room until at least noon on Friday. I wanted to stay in the apartment as long as I could since it was bigger and afforded me more freedoms than the dorm, so I had signed up to move out after graduation on Saturday. I figured that should give me plenty of time to move at a nice, leisurely pace instead of busting my hump trying to move everything in just a few hours. In an effort to speed things up, I asked to get the key to my new room before finishing in my old room. This of course is not the normal way to go about getting anything done here because it is probably the most efficient and most logical and we just can't have that on this campus. In the end, my request just turned out to be more of a waste of time and another upsetting episode of pettiness and legalistic ignorance. The one thing that really upset me during the whole process was a comment made by my former dorm manager. When trying to brainstorm ideas about how to go about getting moved, he suggested I just leave the door to my new room unlocked. This of course was totally unacceptable to me. I was going to be putting between 10 and 15 thousand dollars worth of TVs, stereos, DVDs, CDs, and clothes in the room, and he wanted me to leave it all in an unlocked room where I could not monitor it. With most people moving out of the dorm at that time, if anyone had wanted to go into my room, pick up something, and carry it to their car, it wouldn't have looked out of place in the least bit to anyone. So Monkeynuts (the dorm manager), in all his wisdom, tells me I should just trust everyone since this is a Christian school... I just need to have faith in my fellow students not to steal anything. ...Just like all those other people who have had stuff stolen from them. So no... I wasn't gonna do that. But the upsetting part was the hypocrisy on his own part. His big hold-up was that if he gave me my housing folder now, I might not clean my apartment before moving out. He expects me to trust people I don't know with thousands of dollars while he won't trust me to clean my room. He seemed to think that folder was the one thing that was binding me to doing a good job and doing what I was supposed to. His lack of "faith" in me was quite disturbing considering his recent comments.

To tell you the truth, I wasn't really expecting him to be too accomodating to my request, so if he just hadn't said that last little bit, I would have been totally fine with the situation. Instead he had to open his big mouth and spew stupid all over me and that bothered me to no end. It really helped to cement my low opinion of the mindless minions at this institute of higher learning. True, he is only a dorm manager, campus maintenance man, and amateur auto mechanic, but I don't think that is an excuse for such ignorance. This incident combined with my earlier run-in with Information Technology Services has almost inspired me to write a letter to the university president. If I thought I could remain objective and professional, and if I really thought he'd care, I'd do it, but I've pretty well lost my respect for this town and this school.

So on to Saturday. I wake up about 7:30 so I can meet Aaron's family before graduation to get a good seat. At about 8am, I'm told by my RA that I have to move out immediately. This was really quite a shock and an even bigger inconvienence. I had signed up for 4pm, but apparently that was not important. I had to move out before graduation. I hurried to throw everything I had left in the apartment into my truck, but it soon became clear I was not going to make it to graduation. Now while I'm not usually all about being in a huge crowd of people, I did have friends who were graduating and I wanted to be there to see them, probably for the last time. I wasn't gonna leave a good portion of my earthly belongings sitting in the bed of my pickup, so I hurried to unload the bed into my dorm room and made it over to graduation about an hour late. I still got to see Aaron and Rachel walk, so I guess I got all I wanted from the whole experience, but I was still a little peeved. Someday I know I'll get over it, but for now I still go over that weekend over and over in my head. Just wishing I'd said the things I thought instead of being so polite. Sometimes I just wish I could go off on someone, but thats just not who I am. I guess thats why I write. Its a good release.