Living Lies

Some highlights from commencement, interspersed between pictures from senior week- pictures made black and white to add gravitas and make pictures seem better than they really are.

At the soc/anthro department open house, an hour that my family wishes I had never subjected them to, I introduced the folks to many professors because well, I knew all of them. I just didn't take all of their classes. When we got to Dickey and Mother saw me chatting, she assumed that I was tight with her and proceded to tell Dickey how I talk about her all the time. It seemed like a safe line to say, except that I had never had her and really would have absolutely no reason to write home about her, except to say that she's really nice, is good friends with Riles, and we chat when we see each other. It was thus incredibly obvious to all involved that Mother was lying. And suddenly, the open house got just a little bit more awkward and excruciating.

Arif is a name that is hard to pronounce. Thus, most people, I'm sure Arif included, expected it to be butchered during Commencement, when even the most obvious of names were mispronounced. Dean Foster may have had a steady voice, but he did not have much luck managing the letters. Yet no one could have expected how he pronounced Arif's name: He didn't. He called him Raiff (ray-fe) instead. And graduating with someone else's name? Sucks a lot more than having your name butchered.

The day before commencement, not wanting my middle name to be butchered or replaced, I, along with other 'hard to pronounce' kids went to see the dean after graduation rehearsal (before he switched Arif's name for Raiff). Dean Foster had a notebook with all of our names and a separate column for phonetics and pronunciation notes. Liberal name changes aside, I thought he had a system that worked for him and was hopeful that he wouldn't be too off when saying my name. After all, I was one of those select few who had to call a special voice mailbox and say my full name for him nine times. When I approached and asked how he was going to say my name, however, I could see that my optimism was misplaced. In the binder, he had no phonetics written next to my name, just a desperate note that said "read quickly."