don't you hesitate to buy my love

i left this morning at nine:forty-five to go to the sacm graduation (the final celebration for my master's degree before i have both feet steady in my phd program) and came home at six. i don't think anyone fully understands what a time suck graduations are until you're going home from one. and then it kind of slips your mind before the next one so you leave every single one with that gnawing feeling of, "but wait... what happened to the entire day?" and since most of the day is spent in rooms with artificial lighting and no windows and too many people you don't really realize how much time is passing. it feels like you've been there for three seconds and three hours all at the same time. it's like you're in some kind of time warp black hole kind of thing where there are hundreds of people who don't know each other that are all celebrating the same thing. i dunno. it's weird.

after the ceremony (where they gave us absolutely no food. for someone who went for the food, i was disappointed. and hungry) we stopped by the job fair. aside from the companies that weren't hiring women, the one company that was so super excited by the fact that they started hiring women six months ago (but not for any of the cool jobs, they're pretty much secretaries) that it kind of made me sick, a chemistry company that outsourced their IT department, and a pharmaceutical company that wasn't hiring IT at the moment, everyone was super excited for IT graduates. here's what you go home with when you are an IT graduate looking for a job:

• twelve pens (two with highlighters on the other end) and two pencils
• two notebooks (about the size of your hand) with attached pens
• a triangle highlighter with three colors
• six USB flash drives (for a total of eighteen GB of storage): one looks like a giant pill, one an ambulance, one's on a keychain, two mini ones, and one normal one
• two of those to-go coffee cup thermos things that i'm totally blanking on the name of
• a t-shirt and baseball cap
• a light up bouncy ball 
• a stress ball
• a measuring tape
• a keychain
• a clip thing or something (i really have no idea what it is)
• one of those id carrying case things that attach to a belt hole
• two bottles of zamzam (the special water from makkah)
• six bags: a leather briefcase, two small backpack/laptop case things, and three of the reusable shopping bag type bags
• a ginormous pile of brochures and catalogs
• three jobs pretty much promised to you and others that you're "really likely to get"
• a really bad headache

pretty much a ridiculous amount of things. i'm obviously choosing a potential career based on which company bought me the nicest present. companies that only had a pen, you're not looking too good. (except for you alyamamah university, because i really liked your pen.)

*Buy My Love - Wynter Gordon (i never listened to this song. google suggested it.)