Bend Over For Your Regularly Scheduled Anal Invasion

my search for a second job is over. not because i found a second job. my current employers now want me to work 24 hours a week. it's good and it's bad. i have no room for fucking around at all this semester. the classes are harder, and i have no free time to speak of.

on the upside, i am not longer staring into the abyss of financial despair. at age 28, it is supremely embarassing to ask my parents or siblings for money. i also just paid for a $230 trip to the repair shop for my car. the front engine pipe had to be replaced, an oil change had to be administered, and of course, the 2004 state inspection had to be done. i was getting really paranoid about driving the car around with an expired inspection sticker in the middle of february. so, the increased demands at work are coming at a crucial time.

on the downside, my two cs classes are going to be awful. the professor for my assembly programming and hardware architecture class announced that we should do a warm-up assignment in preparation for our second programming project. he said this while gleefully laughing in amusement at our impending sleepless marathons in front of our computers.

three of the cs professors i have had so far are old school -- they were already working as programmers when the c programming language was developed. they know fortran and assembly language as if they grew up speaking them. they've been through their agony and ecstasy of learning how to program computers like gods. they know the hardware components of a pc intimately because they used to write code to run them.

they know exactly what we're going through. except that they think we've got it too easy since we have all these ridicuously easy high level languages to use. we didn't have to master register variables and system stacks during our introduction to the art of programming. we had java, a child's toy that automates an enormous number of common tasks that one would have to code from scratch with more primitive languages.

they are indulgent with us, however. we often get to drop the worst exam score. even then the lowest passing grade can still drop to 55% in some classes.

my second semester calculus class is going to be more difficult than the first. the material is more theoretical, and there is one student who won't ever shut up during class. yes, i have a genuine example of a person with absolutely no social skills whatsoever in my calculus class.

he irritates the professor by speaking out of turn several times during every class. when we were learning l'hospital's rule, this student asked if l'hospital had been a crusader. when we are going over homework, he asks the professor to do a problem, but he gives the wrong page and problem number.

it's almost if he's trying to look really clever. however, he is miserably failing. the students find him amusing and irritating at the same time. i am one who is mostly irritated, and now i try to avoid sitting next to him. his constant interruptions drive me up the wall.

i am also taking an intro philosophy class to fulfill the 'diversity' distribution credit. everyone has to fulfill this requirement regardless of how many gay and lesbian, african american, and women's literature classes they took to earn a degree in literature at their previous institution of higher learning. we are studying the controversial issues of abortion, assisted suicide, the death penalty, pornography, and censorship. happy happy joy joy.