complain complain complain

i'm angry right now. i know that i could take a nice stroll, listen to my "feel good" playlist and eat a baguette to make me feel better, but i don't feel like doing that. i feel like bitching.

my french class is HORRIBLE. it's supposed to be beginning french 2, so you'd think that the prof would assume we have a basic understanding of french, but not enough to understand full conversations, etc. or, at least, that's what i was expecting. but no. this woman who teaches my class speaks incredibly quickly, sometimes mumbles, uses vocabulary that nobody has ever heard and yells at us when we can't understand her. honest to god, those are the 80 most stressful minutes of my day, hands down. in the middle of class i just wanted to cry because i had NO IDEA what was going on. i was looking through my french dictionary, trying desperately to grasp what the teacher was talking about, when she calls me out. i looked at her helplessly, blushed, and said the word i didn't know. the only reason that i'm not dropping this class is that almost everybody in the class feels the same way as i do...in a class of 20, about 3 people understood the class today. after we walked out, the remaining 17 of us kind of looked at each other in disbelief. holy shit.

oh, and then i went to buy a book at the aup bookstore (read: a room the size of a bedroom). aup is really advanced and they do everything very efficiently. buying books is an example.
1. walk up to a woman sitting at a table and tell her your classes you need books for. she asks how you will pay.
2. she scribbles the class numbers on a piece of scratch paper and puts that piece of paper in a box on the wall 3 feet away. she calls for a man to pick up the note.
3. the man looks at the note and disappears into the back. another woman at the desk looks at you and asks how you will pay.
4. the man brings the book out. the woman at the desk rings you up for one arm and two legs. you pay and exit.

heaven forbid i could pick out the book myself, or even hand that note to the book guy. that'd be way too hard. it'd also apparently be too difficult for aup to put their class registration online. nah. it's much easier for every student to wait in a long line for one person to check if a class is opened or closed.


ucsb, i miss you so badly.