i'm surrounded by idiots!
november 17th, 2000

Yesterday, I belched a political rant with the warning that I was a very 
frustrated young cookie. Well, it's friday, and I'm still a very 
frustrated young cookie. So I'm going to bitch, because every woman knows 
that bitching always makes us feel better. Even if we don't want a 
solution, if we don't want anything to get fixed. The solution is in the 
bitching, trust me on this one.

I've not recieved any notification of when I need to register for classes. 
Zero. Zip. Nada. I winged it and guessed, and was luckily not too far off. 
I talked to my advisor, who was about as useless as a shoehorn. "The 
English department is in a state of reformation," he said. I'm beginning 
to think that the English department of ETSU is really all a hoax and it 
doesn't really exist at all.

So I waited for 3:30 to roll around and punched my little numbers in. "You 
are unable to register because you have a registration hold." What? It 
takes me about an hour to track down anyone who can tell me where I can 
find out what this hold is, and another twenty minutes before they can 
tell me what I can do about it.

"You need to get your MMR vaccination," they said.

So I waited around, wasted some time, spent $20 on a shot I didn't even 
need, because I had gotten one a little over a year ago, when I was 
attending Roane State, in spite of the fact that I photocopied the 
information and sent it to them when I had my transcripts sent, in spite 
of the fact they failed to tell me they were missing the information until 
the very hour I was supposed to register. Stormed off to my car seething, 
muttering obsenities under my breath, and calling them all a bunch of 
"friggin' nazis".

Trying to get my schedule straightened out, trying to see exactly how many 
more hours I need to graduate, how much longer I'm going to be stuck in 
this pathetic excuse for a university, before I can take my degree and get 
out of this hopeless town and do something with my life. My advisor told 
me there was no longer the "emphasis on writing" option. So I walk around 
trying to figure out if there is at least a minor in writing, since the 
only reason I wanted to get into college in the first goddamned place was 
to write. No one knows. No one has a clue. "Ask this person, ask that 
person, none of us know what's really going on here, anyway." The English 
website tells me this. I'm telling you - I don't think it exists anymore.

My beef being, I don't want to sit around wasting my time on classes that 
aren't going to do me any good. In having a daughter to raise and take 
care of, I've also accumulated the responsibility of getting the fuck done 
with school. This is my fourth year. I should be graduating the end of 
next semester. And yet it looks like, under the best prospects, I'll have 
another year and a semester to go.

It's frustrating. I'm getting so involved in this school, I'm finally 
being the student I feel I should have been a long time ago, and now I 
keep running into brick walls. Maybe it'll all be cleared up soon, though. 
Speaking of which, I'm going to try to grab the department head before I 
go to class - maybe he can tell me something.

And listen to WETS Sunday, at 6:30-7:00PM, EST. I should be making a cameo 
appearance.