30 posts tagged “rant”

I'm 5 subjects off finishing my degree, and I may have received my first fail for an assignment.

The instructions for the quiz are no longer visible... I believe we were only supposed to answer 3 of the 5 questions.

However, the mark that has come back on the quiz (with the instructions removed) is out of 32.5.... 5 questions at 6.5 marks each. So at the moment blackboard is telling me
 Total score: 15/32.5 = 46.1538%
Maximum possible score: 32.5

I am really hoping this is a system glitch - I have NEVER failed anything before (except for year 10 religion... heh), and am having a bit of a panic attack. The tutor is awol for a couple of days too. *sigh* The joys of being an external student.

Another external student gripe...

I'm doing a Latin course that has weekly assessments. That's fine, whatever. We've only had one so far, I drove in Sunday night before last, dropped it off, all good. In the following Thursday's lecture that I downloaded and listened to, I hear the internal students have received theirs back. It's now Wednesday and I STILL don't have mine back, and the next one is due tomorrow. It's not a huge deal this early on, but if the internals are consistently going to have feedback and whatever a full week before us externals, I'm going to kick up a stink.

Happy Wednesday!

while reading the newspaper. After spending the morning writting a 2000 word essay on war throughout the ages, I decided to take a break and read the paper before starting on my historical fiction essay.

Bad, bad idea. I've been in my own little world for the last week, I had no idea how bad things had gotten in Thailand, and hadn't even heard about what had happened in Mumbai! Between that, the ongoing conflicts in other parts of the world and the looming global recession, I think it can be said that everything has just fallen to shit. Maybe those running around screaming we've reached the 'end of days' aren't too far off the mark.

I think I need to go watch something mindless and happy for a while, I hate feeling so hopeless.

• I woke up this morning unable to turn my head to the right.
  
• The crick in my neck has given me a massive headache
• There's still 7.5 hours until home time.
  
• This article about Gerry Harvey's view on giving to charity. I'm not sure whether the article has just been written to make him look like an insensitive ass, or if he really is an insensitive ass. I'm leaning towards the article just taking a fair bit of what he said out of context. But it still pissed me off.
• One coffee hasn't been enough this morning, and the fact that I am going to have to have another is making me mad.
• This headline pissed me off too. Again.... can you trust anything the SMH reports? Is it just a minority and it's being blown completely out of proportion? Are the claims about domestic violence true, and is it widespread? *sighs* After the 'uncovered meat' speech, I know attitudes expressed in the story are highly possible, but at the same time, I'd like to think that lessons have been learnt, and the media is just doing what the media does best. I think I need to stop reading the newspaper.
• I have a crapload of uni work to do this weekend, so can't get started on my new house. I have 4x500 word mini-essays on the war and peace, 1x 2000 word short story, 1x 500 word 'reflexive piece' on the short story and 1x 2500 word essay on Australian historical children's literature and what it represents. Hopefully I'll be able to get a bit of research done at work today... it's ridiculously quiet here so far this morning.
  

On the upside.... no bruises from my pole dancing class last night. Either I didn't work hard enough, or my skin is finally starting to toughen up. I missed not doing the class last week, it really is a lot of fun.

Surprise surprise.... the North-West Metro has been canned. It was never a brilliant idea, we need a train line not a metro, but it was better than nothing!

All we have are crappy, overcrowded, infrequent buses, that take twice as long as they should because there is not a dedicated bus line the whole way into the CBD. The trip should only be 35 - 40 minutes, but because we're in with all the cars and traffic, it takes double that. You can't get shitty at all the drivers either - if they weren't driving, the buses would be even more crowded than they already are. At least once a week you get stuck standing for the whole trip, which, in heels, is absolute hell. Don't get me started on the North Sydney buses - they're worse than the CBD ones.

*sigh* I think I need to move away...

.... or, more to the point, people in the course.

I've complained about having to critique the work of others being ridiculously time consuming, and complained about people telling the rest of us that we've missed the point entirely... but today I had to laugh out loud.

There's a girl in our group that has missed every single deadline so far. Today she did all her critiquing - it was due 3 weeks ago. Anyway, for EVERY SINGLE PERSON she said either that it was too abstract and she didn't understand it, so they could do better, or just that she didn't like it and they need to do better next time. These coming from someone who didn't even bother to submit their piece last week!!

The girl is an international student, and I suspect a lot of what the rest of us is writing is getting a little lost in translation....

I have to admit though... I did like her one to the girl that told the rest of us that we didn't 'get' the last exercise... nice to see her getting a taste of her own medicine.

I'm frantically getting all my paperwork together to do my tax return this afternoon, and only just discovered the bank account we've been putting our savings towards our house deposit on doesn't PAY ANY INTEREST AT ALL!!!!

A few months ago I suggested we move the money into an ING account, because the interest rate was 8% on it, but my husband couldn't be bothered with it - he doesn't like that you can't access the money straight away if you need it (oh no, you have to wait an entire 24 hours). By my calculations, we've missed out on over $2k worth of interest by not doing this. I am so incredibly pissed off.... as of now, I am taking over complete control of our finances. I already do most of it, as the boy is unable to pay a bill on time, but he likes to think he's better with money than me. Obviously not... the pitiful amount I have in my ING earnt me a couple of hundred in interest... better than a kick in the face!!

I'm a little tired and stressed at the moment, so probably wasn't in the best state of mind to be checking feedback on the creative writing piece I had to submit over the weekend.

I've complained about this course before, having to critique other people's writing is a pain in the ass. But there's no need for rudeness.

One girl wrote an absolutely scathing critique of my work. Now, I know it wasn't great, I wrote it in half an hour. But she's carried on about how it 'isn't my best work' (um, the only other work of mine she has seen is the minimalist poem I posted a few weeks back... it's certainly better than that. She potentially saw the assignment piece I submitted, but it was a load of trash too) and then went on to say I'd missed the entire point of the exercise.

Now, no one else gave me that sort of feedback. No one. Not even the tutor - he didn't think I'd missed the entire point. AND she'd given similar feedback (about missing the point) to other people as well. So, I went back to read her piece... which I couldn't make any sense of at all. It was just an overload of connotations trying to sound intelligent... but it just looked wanky.

Starting to feel better about myself, I decided to do a little facebook stalking. She's straight out of high school! Not that that means much, but it made me feel a bit better about the blunt way she'd critiqued me (most of us are nice in pointing out 'helpful suggestions' rather than just saying it was a piece of crap and we don't know what we're on about). So it made me feel a bit better. A bit, obviously not a lot, or I wouldn't be bitching about it now.

I know it wasn't the greatest piece of writing in history, but I didn't 'miss the point entirely'. At least mine was a cohesive piece, rather than the drivel she wrote. *sigh* Time to press 'post' and get over it.

just a quickie... why are all writers so tortured? Or should I say wanna-be writers? All anyone in my creative writing class ever writes is depressing, drama-laden drivel that is 20 times longer than it needs to be.

My writing isn't much better, but I try and keep it short and sweet for the sanity of others. GRR!

This semester is taking a lot more out of me than I thought it would, too many discussion boards to keep up with!

In the Children's Lit unit I'm doing, I'm finding it really hard to keep my mouth shut when a certain person posts things. I know everyone's entitled to their opinion, but this woman just won't let up, and starts arguments with anyone that doesn't agree with her.

The biggest arguments (which I've tried to mostly stay out of) is one about issues in Young Adult Fiction. She keeps complaining that the novels we are studying don't delve deeply enough into the issues. The opposing view (which I agree with) is that fiction doesn't NEED to address issues in any depth. Getting teenagers to read at all is a good thing, isn't the fact that these books even touch on issues enough? Why can't a young adult novel be written purely for entertainment? Why does it have to address multiculturalism and racism on some deep, educational level? Why can't the books be read and given credit for what they are?

Then this woman is bitching and moaning about how cold the parents are in Two Weeks with the Queen, apparently the author should have spent a chapter having the parents discuss their decision with Colin. Now, I personally hate the book (after studying and hating it in high school) but why can't this woman just take the book for what it is? I know university students are supposed to be critical and whatever, but this woman just never has ANYTHING positive to say about any of the novels. I'd love to see some of her writing.... grrrr

1. People who substitute ‘x’ for other letters as in ‘officeworx’. You’re saving yourself one letter, and making yourself look like an idiot – why do it?
2.  When someone asks you for something 8 times in the space of 5 minutes, when you told them the first time that it will be an hour before you receive the thing they want.
3.  When you’re out with people who speak another language, and one of them insists on speaking that language when they know full well you can’t understand them. It’s just plain rude.
4.  People that complain for the sake of complaining. A message was posted on one of my uni discussion boards saying that the feedback survey didn’t leave anywhere for her to complain about the lectures. I’m curious as hell to know what she could possibly be wanting to complain about. The lectures were recorded in a studio (rather than just being a recording of an on-campus lecture), were relevant and interesting, and the only thing that I could see that was remotely annoying was the female lecturer’s voice was a bit painful to listen to… but this isn’t something you can exactly complain about – the poor woman can’t help how she sounds. Stupid lady in my unit… I hope I don’t run into her again. She’s been a know it all all through
5.  Another case of someone complaining… our 10 year reunion is this year, and a girl was organizing it, didn’t get the sort of response she was hoping for, so threw it all in (this girl also refused to let ANYONE help her out). So 3 other girls have organised something else, and spent a lot of time working on it. I was irritated to see yet another girl (who I didn’t like very much in High School, she was one of the ‘cool’ girls) had written on someone’s facebook wall for all to see ‘what idiots organised for the reunion to be on a Friday night and all the way out at ****?’ First of all – did coolgirl step in and attempt to organise something when the first one fell through? No. Secondly- just because she’s moved away from the area we all grew up in, 50% of us are still in the area… and for those who have moved away, 90% still have family living in the area where they can stay. The venue was actually a very good choice.
6. When people want something, but instead of emailing, IM, or even calling through the request, they come and stand by you and won’t go away until you’ve done it, even when it’s obvious that you’re busy working on something else. Irritation increases if they come stand and stare at your monitor instead of standing on the other side of the desk while they do this. This actually made for an incredibly awkward moment yesterday, I was updating salary information, and someone just walked up behind me to ask for something stupid, and fully leaned in to look at what I was working on. Guess what – it’s none of your business what I’m doing, and even if it was, this especially was something that you shouldn’t be seeing, so I have no sympathy that you’ve just seen that you’re disgustingly underpaid because you were too much of a wimp to ask for a payrise when your job changed.
7. The cake shop that I ordered my sister’s birthday cake didn’t call to confirm the order yesterday… now I’m paranoid they didn’t get it and the stupid comment I had arranged to have on there won’t happen, and she’ll end up with a stock standard boring cake. UPDATE: Just called, and the cake is all good, and will be delivered to me at 3. Now must make sure I catch a bus home where I will have a seat.
8. I’m hating that now I’m complaining and I’m letting this stuff get to me. I blame the rain outside. Thank god it’s nearly the weekend (and a weekend filled with fun things at that!! (yes, I know I need to study as well… urgh))