Tuesday, July 05, 2005

stupid buses, stupid school, stupid me

i'm not the most aware person when i'm running on less than 4 hours of sleep after an entire day of walking, sweating and using my brain. i make excuses, but i'm sure a smarter person wouldn't have made the same mistakes. two days in a row, i've taken the wrong fucking bus and had to get off cross the street and take it back to somewhere familiar.

yesterday, i mistakenly got on the 624 instead of the 642. already, pretty stupid of me, but it wasn't until 4 stops on the wrong route before i realized that i was on the wrong bus. then, after i got off the bus to cross the road to wait for a bus to go into the other direction (back to where i knew where i was), there was no way for me to cross the god damn road! it was y-shaped, where one road turned to two, and i had to cross at the point of diversion, except the traffic light alternated between allowing each direction of the road to go, which meant that where i was, there was a constant flow of cars. i don't kno why they bothered putting a fucking crosswalk where people couldn't really cross safely! i stood by trying to frogger my way across the 4 lanes and watched bus after bus after bus go by, buses i could have taken. when i finally made my way across, no more buses came for what must have been at least 30 minutes. i think they're just making trouble for people with two buses 624 and 642 that stop at the same place, daring people to not pay attention or read the number wrong, or remember the number wrong. fucking bus!

because i had learned from my lack of awareness the day previous, the public transportation system decided to show me that i had a hold of nothing, that they still owned me. seeing a 642 bus come, i waved my hand for it to stop and got on it. i made sure that it was going on the rite route by seeing where it was going, since, while i thot 642 was the rite number, i'd been wrong before when i thot i'd been rite. after a few stops that were familiar, i spaced out and started thinking about how much trouble my whole day had been. after a few more stops, i looked outside and didn't recognize the surroundings. i went to look at the posted bus route and noticed that it had made a turn i hadn't wanted to take, and that i had to get off the bus, cross the road, and take another bus back. what the fuck is up with that!? well, i'm not exactly sure what went wrong tonite, but i think it was that there's a green 642 and a red 642, and while most of the route is the same, it's different exactly from where i get on that bus. fucking bus! fucking bus system!

i'm sure anyone who is already familiar with the system knos to pay attention to these sorts of things, but i had no idea. at least now i kno, rite? no! wrong! now, they're just going to throw something else at me, like green 642s that you pay-as-you-enter go a different route from the ones that you pay-as-you-leave, or i dunno, a green 642 with an odd number of passengers goes one way, and one with an even number of passengers goes another way, and it changes as people get on and off the bus. hopefully, i have a good grasp of taipei public transportation and won't have to suffer thru more frustration.

speaking of frustration, taiwan normal university has a horrible method of putting people in the rite sections, and an even worse method of switching classes. first of all, after a proficiency test that didn't test my proficiency, i was placed in a class that was way too easy for me and at a time i didn't select. in order to change classes, you need to wait until the 3rd day of the quarter. except, when the third day of the quarter came, there were no open spaces in any of the classes i wanted to get into. in fact, i was not the only one with this problem. dozens of other students also had trouble getting into a class they wanted. the only solution, it turned out, was to commandeer an already-existing class and make the teacher teach the material we wanted to learn. well, whatever works.

as a result of the shitty system, i spent a better part of the day on the campus. i woke up at 6 to make it there by 8 in the morning to see if i could switch classes and/or attend the class i was signed up for at the time. then at 10, i sat in on a class that might or might not have had an open space... for 10 minutes before the teacher told me that i probably wouldn't get into that class. then i ran into this other girl looking for another class, and we spent the next 20 minutes trying to find a class that had open spaces. whose idea was it to make each class 10-person maximum? at 12, i went to the fun cooking class, and then at 2, i had a 3 hour class. exhausting, i tell you, and then i have a lot of homework to do. actually, i should prob get started on that.

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