i wasn't thinking

"too many people buy things they don't need with money they don't have trying to impress people they don't even like"
i had an argument with someone today who agreed with the sentiment but tried to explain to me that running after status symbols is "human nature" and not societal and didn't think much of my argument that there is no such thing as "human nature" (except, of course, for the need to connect events with causes, often quite incorrectly).

i said something during that argument that i didn't regret until he said, in much nicer language: "you're being an asshole". and then i realized that i was being an asshole.

rule no. 1: don't be an asshole.

it doesn't matter that my apology was accepted, the damage was done and i think i lost more respect for myself than he did.

---
that wasn't the first time today that i managed to offend someone - it's funny how our hard-of-hearing french teacher misses all the communication directed at her, but the one time i make a snide remark ("see how gracefully she ignores us") under my breath she stops the class to ask "what was that?"

well. so i told her what i thought about the "model exam" she gave us that was stupidly hard and time-consuming, and when she responded with "none of my previous students ever accused me of being unfair" i rolled my eyes. to which she really got offended. pg tells me that she's always taking offense, but damn, this stupid woman has been behaving remarkably unprofessionally and now i'm supposed to worry that she might... i don't know what. but it's not a nice atmosphere to add to an already tense "i hate these classes" situation.

it doesn't help that the whole thing started when the girl next to me raised an issue that we all have, and she was told to stop wasting everybody's time. unlike our class-"mates", i wasn't going to let her take it alone. another student approached me after class to thank me for standing up for myself. wasn't i standing up for all of us? where's the "us"?

after lunch with pg and registering for next semester's classes with our secretariat, i made my way to work. i wasn't feeling too good, but i had things to do that needed to be done there. scr taught me about programming for the cloud (the azure system's actually quite well designed, and simple to get the hang of), and i was charged with writing a testing system that should, i suggested, have taken a handful of minutes.

i'm going to have to learn to predict coding time better, because i walked out of there about four and a half hours later :(

ah! good news. my boss re-arranged my payment schedule on the fly last night while we were on the phone discussing the system emergency, and i now get paid either at the end of a project or the end of the month, whichever comes first. THAT makes sense, considering that most of the last couple of weeks were spent performing tasks that weren't on the project schedule...

strange - without any actual planning, i've been working almost exactly the amount of hours i said i would :P