posted 2004/10/19 at 20:31
Normally when I have a really shitty day, I'll just post some emo thing up here about how much my life sucks and all of that and spare all of you the boring details. This was not one of those shitty days.
So I've got this group presentation for one of my classes coming up this week, right? And the group needed to meet to hammer out how we were going to run things, and decided to meet today at 1230. This sounds all fine and Belldandy, but given how late my classes are this semester, 1230 is usually when I'm rolling out of bed. But I can just set my alarm early and handle things from there, right?
Well, not exactly. I went to bed late the previous night, so I set my alarm to wake me up at the latest possible moment for me to get up, do what I needed to do, and get out of here. Of course the alarm goes off and I take too long to get out of bed and lose some serious time. No problem, I just didn't get online before leaving the house -- which makes me feel a bit off about the day but isn't all that dehabilitating -- and I got out of the door with enough time to get to my appointment.
Of course, then the bad stuff just fed on itself. My car's already out of commission due to battery problems, and I've been driving around the family's backup van. I get out to the van, and it won't start; despite showing a quarter-full gas gauge, it was out of gas. I'm really pressed for time here, so father gives me the keys to the main van, meaning that if something goes wrong at the house the folks have no transportation. Now, not only have I not driven the good van before, but I'm not entirely sure I'm insured on it. Still, I have to get to the meeting, so I start the van up. Lesson one about the van that father never told me about: the drive gauge is off. So if I want to drive, I have to shift the van into neutral, and so on. Lesson two: Those brakes are fucking touchy. Seriously, if I depressed the brake pedal just a quarter of an inch, the van screeched to a total halt.
Anyway, I speed a bit to get to campus with enough time to park and get to the meeting just on time ... and there's no fucking empty parking spaces. I literally drove around for ten minutes just waiting for a spot to open up, by which point I was super-late.
I get to the space where we all agreed to meet, and no one is there. After wandering the hallways for a couple of minutes, another student in the class (not in the group) tells me that they're all meeting in an office I didn't even know about, so I show up there and I have to catch up on what they've been talking about, and keep in mind I didn't get enough sleep the previous night so I'm groggy enough to start with. I'm supposed to have something ready tomorrow, but I can't even remember the details of it right now. I've got the details written down in my binder, but I don't even know if I'll be able to read my own handwriting tomorrow.
Anyway, so I go up to my office, and I've got all this time to kill before classes, but I'm too groggy to work on school stuff effectively. The professor I wanted to talk to about my big project was finally up in her office, but I had to go to the bathroom (damn diet makes me pee twenty times a day), and when I got back she was gone. I go to class, but again, I'm feeling so out of it that I'm not able to contribute that well, and I hate it when that happens. Marge Piercy (a really cool feminist poet) was giving a recitation after my last class, but of course I had to get home to make sure the folks had transportation in case of an emergency.
So I get out to the van to learn lesson number three: the backlight on the instrument panel doesn't work. I had to spend five minutes fumbling about in the dark (UT's parking lots aren't lit all that well) to finally find out that there's this thing I have to plug into the cigarette lighter to front-light the display, and on top of everything else it's dark and rainy and I have a hard time seeing the road in those conditions, unless I've got my ass close to the ground like in my Camry. By some miracle I got home in one piece, though.
Of course, because I got up so early, I was starving by the time I got back here, so I had to have dinner as soon as possible. Now I've got a choice between doing DDR tonight or watching SVU, and with as shitty as I feel right now, I've got to tell you, SVU is winning out ...
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon