wet ride

last night:
i'm really glad i have the iphone: reading up for class wherever i am is indeed very useful.

the ride last night was, strangely, mostly wet - it was a bit foggy. it was a good route, though. i spent a lot of it talking about myself; i was still a bit in shock (the being broke thing) but i did receive what sounds like mighty good advice.

i was broken by the time i got home.

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after a decent night's sleep and a chilled, pleasant wake-up i found myself outside the class an hour early... the bus either gets me there really early or by the skin of my teeth :/

the time was spent lecturing some of my fellow classmates - a quick catch-up and everyone knew what was potting. if only the lesson had been as simple and poignant... it was a frightful two hours of freud, penis envy and the most disgusting member of our faculty dribbling on about masturbation... we slipped and slid with our nasty comments until we simply couldn't stop giggling - i had to leave the class at one stage because it got so bad :$

we've agreed that we all need to do is make penis hats and wear them in one of her lectures.

it was kinda sad that three of us walked in with empty laptop / netbook batteries, and there was only one socket... next time, splitter.

the professor in charge of the graduate program has informed me that i won't be eligible for any exemptions without at least 90 for each course... she was surprised when she discovered that i'm taking five courses and not two as she'd originally thought.
"that's a lot"
"i know"

i reached breaking point halfway through her class - it's tough to read *and* listen *and* participate simultaneously - and the vending machine outside took my fiver and sulked.

not on.

i pushed the button, eventually pushing it *just* hard enough for the coin to come out.

so i tried again. it got stuck again.
this time - i needed even more force to retrieve it. i managed to hit it hard enough that i not only got my coin back, but it had been turned into a tenner!
that's one smart vending machine.

after class i passed along my copy of alice in sunderland to the professor, who's (obviously) already impressed and hopefully will enjoy the content as well. i find it hard to imagine anyone interested in literature not loving it.

i - as usual - forgot about meeting with pg after class :$
we sat together for about ten minutes, and just after she went to class i met up with spider and eidetic for lunch. lunch talk was on floating points, and i got bored fairly quickly... i was dead tired, but i didn't feel like sleeping on the grass. i probably should have.

i took the bus to work - missing my stop because i passed out for a short while - and spent my two hours there synchronizing with my second and dealing with a php page that gave the impression that it had been hurled together by a bunch of drunken, belligerent apes.

i ran away as soon as i could, grabbed a quick nap and then went with pg to the rally.

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the rally began decently enough, the first speeches were, if not identical, very similar to those of last thursday.

an ultra-orthodox dude spoke - he had a couple of good points, but then he went completely in the wrong direction and lost our interest. a pity.

as we made our way towards the barricades i ran into her - what happened next i didn't see coming... just as i introduced her to pg, a guy next to us who'd tried to pass the barricade was caught by a bunch of thugs in uniform. they weren't ashamed to lash out violently until a bunch of us climbed into them (verbally) - including me and her.

the incident brought up all the anger and frustration, and i didn't hold anything back. eventually they let the dude go, and i was saddened when he replied, to my offering my details as a witness, that he wasn't going to pursue.

we spent the next hour or so in the streets, we had tear gas thrown at us, a couple more unpleasant incidents... at the end, though, one of the organizers gave a powerful speech (while the police videotaped as many of our faces as they could) and then we stood and sang the national anthem.

and then tried to go home. that took a while, because the police were "under orders" and didn't realize that we'd already finished protesting - they wouldn't let us out.

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i've been offered some interesting-sounding work tonight - but first, i have a presentation to make tomorrow and i haven't done the reading yet :S