I’m on the bus to Uni this morning. Two glorious hours of boredom lay ahead of me. Usually I like to nap through it with my mp3 player turned up to block out ambient noise. The added bonus of this is that no-one likes to sit next to a sleeping person for some reason, so i don’t feel crowded. But today my battery is dead, I’m wide awake and have no elbow room. Ah well, at least I’m updating ;) And with my laptop open i can charge my mp3 player. Win!
Which leads me to the first of this posts observations – bus passengers. Until a few stops ago I was sitting behind a very large woman with body odour which whenever I caught a whiff of made me retch slightly in the back of the throat. Mingled in with this, she also had that ‘sick smell.’ You know the one? The one people seem to have about them when they have a particularly nasty cold. It’s not pleasant. Not that I blame her for being ill, but I do wonder how many people will be afflicted with her disease over the next few days. I’m betting on the young parents which have just taken her place, pram in front of them. Ah, the the goodness of public transport. It’s filled with wonderful people who (to quote the fantastic Terry Pratchett) ‘regard “Hygiene” as a greeting’.
There’s one man standing at the doors with a rain coat, one of those caps with the back neck flap and a trolley that you often see pushed by elderly women. He’s just whistling away cheerfully.
The occupants have thinned out a bit. Most of them got off at the shops we just passed, including the girl sitting next to me whose place no-one has taken, so I have a bit more space. It will fill up again though. I hate not having room to move my arms – if I want to get something out of my pocket I look like a T-Rex trying to scratch its belly. In a retarded kind of way.
This bus rout is deceptively long. There are times that I think we’re almost there, but then I remember a major stop that we haven’t been to yet, and I settle in for another half hour of snooze.
I don’t even know why I’m going to uni today. Perhaps it’s in the hope that the ONE two-hour tute that I don’t even have to attend will offer a glimmer of insight. It’s for literature. And my tutor is killing the love.
My tutor – who I have dubbed ‘GayPirate’ because he has both ears pierced and always has a ten-o’clock shadow – doesn’t like out group. Why? Because on the rare occasions that we actually talk to him we openly disagree with any hypothesis he throws at us. So we barely say anything, So he just talks, and he just talks on and on and on and on. And we tune out. And then he asks a question and we have NO CLUE what to say. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, one of us will have heard enough of his vacuous shit to save us from silence and respond to the question... by disagreeing completely to the point he’s trying to make. I am one of the few people in the class who does this on occasion. I spend the rest of the time trying not to fall asleep. In fact, in last weeks class we watched a short film after about an hour of his talk talk talking, and whilst I was visibly nodding off while he droned on and on, I was wide awake for the film. I didn’t expect to be as I’d had a late one, but fuck me sideways the short film which we had already seen in the lecture was more interesting.
The real kicker though? I have friends in his second tutorial group – the one he goes to when we finish – and they said he actually complains about us. Not because we say nothing – the other group do too – but because we disagree with his views! The other group just absent mindedly nods at whatever he says.
UPDATE: I am now finishing this blog entry after the tute class. I disagreed with him a lot today. A lot. And the entire time I was thinking 'Gay Pirate with way too much self regard.'
Anyway, I realised something else today - Universities have the largest number of people that wear berets in the western world outside of the French army and New York. I wonder if they realise that the majority of French people who wear them are in the armed forces? The only people you see wearing berets in Paris are the soldiers with sub-machine guns guarding the Eiffel Tower, and tourists.I watched a french film called 'And They All Lived Happily Ever After' on Saturday night. What I found hilarious about it is that at the very end, a woman who's husband is having an affair eventually has one of her own. With Johnny Depp. He's in it for all of five minutes, and he gets the girl, steams up the camera and probably collects the biggest pay cheque of the lot of them. They couldn't find a French actor good looking enough, so they brought in good ole Depp. I had to laugh. There are no obviously sexy men in France. They make up for it with the accent. (If you haven't heard Depp speak in french, by the way, you haven't lived. It's pure masturbation fuel, no matter what your sexual preference is).
Spunky and I went and saw a movie last night with a friend of ours, who Spunky routinely calls 'The Thing.' They've been friends for years; The Thing calls Spunky a Wookie.
Anyway, when I knocked off work (I'm selling cameras now :) The pay isn't fantastic but I get great Spivs and staff discounts) the three of us went and saw 'The Boat that Rocked.'
I'd heard some very bad reviews for it, but I liked it a lot. It's just lighthearted fun and not meant to be taken seriously. Also has a killer soundtrack. Check it out, especially if you're a fan of the sixties. And sexually based humor. I know I am :D
Anyway, Lou out.
