Here's Hoping I Graduate!

Greetings friends. I received another e-mail today forwarded to me by my adviser about graduation. As it is the close of my senior year at this prestigious university, you can imagine the types of strong feelings that might be swelling around in my body. Nervousness, the feeling of anxiety associated with a fresh start, a complete cut-off from the people you've grown to know and love. Excitement, because of the endless possibilities that surround you as you enter the world as a full adult. Drunk, because it's noon somewhere.
But this letter wasn't about those natural feelings we all have. It was about: PANIC. And not the good kind of panic, like a Douglas Adams book, the bad kind of panic, like Panic at the Disco. In the past few weeks, the registrar let me know that they were having some issues with my petition to graduate. They sat me down in the office and slapped me across the face and said, YOU SHALL NOT PASS.
I took it as an insult. Surely Matt Shore, the single greatest comedic mind of our generation or any other (including Jewish and Canadian ones), the world's hero and our beloved successor to Christ, surely he, of all people, should be awarded not just a diploma, but a crown of golden thorns to signify his brilliant glistening martyrdom for our times! And his diploma should also be made of gold! And he should ride out on griffins, and drop thousand dollar watches to the crowd, and they're all saying, "ahhhhh ahhhhh matt-shore-is-great--ahhhh---ahhh"
But the registrar wouldn't listen to that kind of logic. They kept claiming I was missing two classes from my major. But I wasn't! I claimed, but I give them too much credit. In truth the registrar never grabbed me, never sat me down, because the registrar is not a people person. The Registrar is a cold corporate machine made to package students up and fire them out of a cannon into the sun. You know how they've got you and you don't even know it? They number you. 2338033. That's my student id number, and as I see it appear on every transcript or forwarded e-mail from these people more and more I realize it's the only way to keep track of me. The people in the registrar, aside from my wildcard photo (which if anyone's seen it, is NOT a good indication), have no idea who I am, how I look, what I did while I was here, what mattered to me, or where I'm going. Which means at some point along the way, the machine went from serving students to serving the machine, which we built a long time ago to serve the students. Not that I'm complaining or anything. 2338033. Come to think of it, it has a nice ring to it.
But the truth of the matters, and I use that term loosely always, but the real goddamn truth of the matter is this: my major--creative non-fiction--was invented the year I applied for the sequence. In fact, the reason it was created was because they saw the current programs as being insufficient to properly educate at my level. It's often a problem I have with professors--they fail to recognize that I'm smarter than them. I find it cute. So I always try to stroke my beard whenever I'm talking to a professor, that way they know I "really care." But I digress, the point being--the point at hand--is that somehow, despite my clear history of telling the truth at every and all intervals, I was called out on a bluff! But I was purely innocent! When they created the non-fiction program (to impress me) there were some snags along the way, specifically with CAESAR. The NU registration program is more a series of snags itself than a literal facilitator of class selection, so you can imagine how a fledgling program could fall out of the nest and plummet into the briars, its wings torn and broken by the fall.
Suffice it to say, they didn't count the classes I'd taken as classes that applied, but they all really did. Still it's a little bit LATE IN THE GAME to be learning this stuff, especially when it's all administrative and I've done my share in full!
Hmm, maybe the bureaucracy that keeps Northwestern alive is also the Akira-like monster destroying it from the inside!
If you want to watch Akira to draw the comparisons, I am so game.