Today is my first Wednesday of school, and Wednesdays are Weird. That’s because on Wednesdays, I have classes between 4pm and 10 pm, and that causes a lot of little complications.

One of which is just getting my fat ass home. There are buses that run that late, but they don’t take me all the way home. So I figured I will end up taking a cab a lot of the time, at least till the fancy schmancy headphones I ordered from Indigo arrive.

With them on, I might decided I have the energy to walk home. No guarantees though, at least not at this time of the year.

Another complication is blogging. Normally, I blog after supper. At said supper, I have a liter of Diet Coke in order to give me extra energy for blogging. This has been my system for a long time and it works.

But I can’t do that on Wednesdays because I won’t even be having supper tonight, or at least, not the kind of supper I am used to. My classes run straight through from 4 to 10, so there is no time for me to eat a meal. I am going to have to get into the habit of bringing food with me to eat between classes and during breaks. Simple, easy stuff that can be eaten on the go, like fruit, or chips, or the like.

That reminds me. Must refill my water bottle before I go.

If I didn’t bring stuff with me, I would end up going without food for far too long. Normally, I eat lunch at noon. That would mean I would end up going ten hours without eating, and that would be Bad. Very Bad. My blood sugar would definitely end up in the danger zone.

So this is a matter of life or death, or at least, health or sickness. I will have to learn to either pack stuff, or at least have the money to buy stuff from the vending machines at school.

Back to the subject of blogging. Clearly, my best bet is to do my blogging before class. I might not manage that today because I realized my predicament a little late for that, so I might not finish blogging before it’s time to go. But in the future, I will have a better grip on things.

Or at least, I hope that I will.

Today, I have Canadian History Since 1867 and then Intro To Philosophy. I am not looking to the Intro To Philosophy course, both because I didn’t really want to take it and because it’s also taught by that twit Glouberman that I had for Intro to Ethics yesterday.

I don’t normally use professor’s names here, both out of respect for them and for the prudent reason that I don’t want them Googling themselves and find me talking smack about them, but fuck it. You’re a twit, Glouberman. And Kant was a twit too.

You two twits were made for each other.

I don’t know what to expect in that History class. Like I said before, I haven’t taken History since high school. Hope I can still keep up. So far, my naturally high level of retention has served me well. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I will find the class easy.

That said, I am looking forward to learning things that have a narrative structure like history does. History is story, after all. It’s right there in the name. So I am looking forward to learning the story of Canada and how we got to where we are right now.

After all, someone has to know Canadian history. That person should probably be Canadian. Too often, we Canadians are mesmerized by the enormous reality TV carnival that is the USA, and we end up knowing more about them than we do about ourselves.

It really is like having ringside tickets to the freak show.

Hmmm. I seem to have run out of blogging energy all at once. Well I am two thirds done. Having to do the last third when I get come won’t be a big deal.

(—)

History class ended an hour early, so, time to finish blogging.

It was quite good. Prof seems young, eager, alert, and engaged. I feel like in the 100 minutes he was teaching us, I doubled my knowledge of Canadian history class, which isn’t saying much.

I was furiously taking notes the whole time, but I am used to that now. In fact, I prefer it. It keeps me busy during lectures so my mind doesn’t wander. Odds are, I will never look at my notes again after I write them, but the process itself is worthwhile.

Hungry. Gonna go buy something sandwich like.

(—)

And now I am fed. Got an egg salad sanwich (was hoping for chicken salad, but they only had egg. At least a chicken was involved), plus two pumpkin spice muffins (one for now, one for later). That plus water from my water bottle and the banana I brought from home made for a very pleasant meal – no starchy carbon component ( like fries or chips ) needed.

In 20 minutes, I got Intro to Philosophy with, sigh, Glouberman again. I sure as fuck hope he has his shit together tonight. I am fairly certain he picked up on my disdain last time. Hopefully that acted as a wake up call of some sort.

The other students might not know how things are supposed to go – but I do!

I feel like maybe I should have used an ellipsis instead of a dash there.

The best part of this delightful unexpected break is that I scored myself an entire couch to relax upon. I have mentioned before that one of my favorite thungs about this building is that there is TONS of seating outside the classroom, and as an experienced student, I know where the good stuff is.

Time for class. More later.

(—)

And now I am home. I have to relate my recently travails, even though I am over the usual word limit.

So phone the affiliates and warn then we are going long.

First off, Glouberman (pronounced GLOBE-er-men) was even more of an idiot in Intro to Philosophy than he was yesterday in Intro to Ethics. I can’t possibly take this for four months times twice a week. I am going to have to do something.

I am going to have to complain to the university. This man should not be in the position of professor. He cannot teach. All he does is ramble off on tangent after tangent. He is a world class dipshit.

I wasn’t sure about complaining until today, though, both because he was worse today than yesterday, and because a classmate approached me in the men’s room at the sinks while we were on break, and confirmed with me that the professor was very confusing, and talked about a lot of things that had nothing to do with what he was supposed to be teaching.

And I felt really bad for that guy, because it was clear that English was not his first language and for him, this must have been extremely confusing.

So now I feel like I gotta do it. For me, and for the fourteen other students. At least, that’s how many were in class today. A lot of them may have dropped the class by now.

And I am considering doing the same thing, for Intro to Philosophy at least. I didn’t really want to take it in the first place. Intro to Ethics, I may stick with. But what happened today was disgraceful.

I mean, he didn’t even have the syllabus printed out for us. Standard operating procedure in all classes is that in the first class, you get a hard copy of the syllabus. But no, he forgot that.

This lead to the first half hour of the class being lost to him, in class, trying to find the file for the syllabus so he could show us what it looked like, all with everything being projected onto the screen. And he is clearly not competent with technology. Eventually a student had to guide him through the extremely simple process of getting the file displayed just to get the class moving.

And then it was just the rambling, babbling, meanderings of someone with an extremely severe case of projectile verbal diarrhea.

And he does it all in this particular kind of casual, airy way that I know is a red flag. It indicates that someone has had to squint real hard in order to keep seeing themselves as getting the job done. These people know they are not doing so good, but convince themselves that they are doing well enough and just messing up a few small and minor details.

Maybe it started out that way, but he’s bloody incompetent now.

Then, after surviving what felt like two and a half hours of mental torture, I decided to treat myself to a cab home. So I call the cab, tell them which entrance I am at and that I will be waiting inside. They say no problem. I wait, no cab. I call back, get different person, tell them the same thing. They say no problem. I wait again. No cab.

Finally, when I called back the third time, before the cycle could begin anew, I said, very clearly articulating, “Maybe the problem is that I am waiting inside instead of at the bottom of the stairs. ”

There was a pause, then the dispatcher said “Oh…. well if you’re not waiting at the bottom of the stairs, the driver won’t see you and they are not allowed to get out of the car. ”

THAT, finally, was the information I needed. Fine, I can’t wait inside. That’s all I needed to know. But this is what happens when people don’t actually listen to the words you say.

You had all the information you needed. All you had to do was pay attention. Dammit.

Well I guess that’s enough for right now. Stay tuned for the actual notes I took in class today. I will make them part of tomorrow’s blog entry. It should be a hoot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.