lastlee

Santa Barbara City College is known for its top notch professors, its beautiful campus, and the lack of financial burden it places on its students. It is less known for overly demanded parking spaces and fascist parking administrators. Finding a parking spot can be a tricky and lengthy procedure, though luck is always welcomed.

So this is my story on Tuesday morning, before class…

I had full intentions to arrive at school earlier than normal so I could go to the bookstore to purchase an atlas of the Middle East, so I left home at around 8:30 (class starts at 9:35). It took about eight minutes to get to the Pershing Park parking lot, which was perfectly normal. Once in the parking lot, I began to realize how wasteful my previous luck with finding parking spots had been (taking less than two minutes to get a spot, or even spotting a vacant spot and beating traffic). I got fed up with Pershing Park and headed to the two lower lots, but had no luck. Several minutes later I decided to go back to Pershing Park with a fresh hope. How quickly hope fades. It seemed like forever. The temperature was starting to rise, now about 90 degrees in my car with no A/C or fans. There it was, the legitimate glory. I spotted a green Jetta with reverse lights in the ideal row, right next to the stairs to the campus. I hurried toward the car with my blinker on, but saw another car in the opposite direction also hurrying. I definitely had my blinker on first. And I was there first. I took a look at the opposition: a fat girl wearing a sweater (probably using her stupid A/C) in a modern Honda Accord. Time seemed to be at a standstill, but eventually the Jetta’s reverse lights illuminated and backed out in the direction favoring the fat girl’s entry, where she could just follow the Jetta’s path right into the spot. Knowing with a conviction that this spot was mine, I could not let that happen. As soon as the Jetta started to drive away, I quickly released the clutch with a careful right foot, then immediately (and intentionally) braked, and then continued into the spot like I meant it. When the fat girl saw my darting right as she started to go, she backed off and went defensive. I clearly let her self-preservation instincts prevent her from being hit by a rusty German machine. I was proud. I am proud. I have no regrets.

The fat girl drove off clearly befuddled and frustrated. She even did a vicarious victory lap for me, though I’m sure she was making some obscene hand gestures at me, but I pretended not to notice.

And here is my visual representation of the action. Not drawn to scale.

Nevertheless, I was unable to purchase my atlas of the Middle East, and I was late to class by about ten minutes.

Ah yes, this is the first round of actual college finals for me. Today I had both Computer Science and Political Thinking finals today. Doing absolutely no studying for the Computer Science final, I did an outstanding job at finishing the 100 [ridiculous] question exam in 660 seconds, or 11 minutes. My original goal was to finish in 1000 seconds, or 16.66 minutes, but I never really took into account the amount of duplicate questions. And no, Jackie (the instructor) doesn’t have the capacity to put in trick questions that are worded with slight differences that turn the meaning backwards. Nope. She had the exact same questions repeating over and over in different places in the test–probably to make it look like it was unintentional. And yes, there were a few Google questions on there. I really wish I had a copy of the exam so I could word everything verbatim, but when you are doing 6.6 seconds per question, it is quite hard to remember the questions verbatim. Here are a few common questions that kept coming up:

The following is an example of a search engine:

a) Newspaper

b) CPU - Central Processing Unit

c) Google

d) HTML

e) ARPANET

or

Something that specifically tells the program what to do is called a(n):

a) bug

b) implementation

c) instruction

d) remote

e) calculator

and so on… I’m pretty sure the latter question was repeated at least five times in the exact wording.

On the subject of the Political Science final, I had a large gap from 11:11 AM to 2:00 PM, so I studied a bit, walked around for a while, studied a bit more, walked a bit more, until it was time for my doom. This final required two blue books, and the subject matter was not discussed at all in the lecture, so we had to know everything about everyone we studied. Luckily for me, I articulated Aristotle and Plato while writing my 9 page paper last week, so I had a decent amount of knowledge on the roots of political thinking. Anyway, unlike the CS final, it took me nearly the entire allotted two hours to write about both prompts. But, in the end I managed to survive, though I actually had a better feeling on this final than on the midterm, on which I got a 95%. Assuming I get at least 85% on my paper, I will need to get 70% or better on the final to get a B. The rest is up for speculation I suppose.

Now I only have three midterms left. Whee.

Okay… so I started this day with a cold. I didn’t get to walk the dogs because my head hurt, so, Linus and Rigby: if you are reading this, I’m sorry. I felt better after a shower, so I decided to head to school–albeit a few minutes late. But nobody cares; it’s Computer Science. I got in my car and turned right out of Canon Dr. (I never knew this was the name of that road until now) to Los Positas. Into the intersection on State St., my car stalled. This happened whilst I was releasing the clutch in first gear, so I assumed my left foot was a little too frisky. I was almost in the middle of the intersection, so there was a need to be urgent in getting the car to a running state. This didn’t really happen. I turned the key in the ignition, it turned over but didn’t fire–a clear sign that the electrical (less spark) is in good condition. Quickly, I decided to stick the car in neutral and push the car back to a parking spot on Canon Dr.. A friendly man at the SB Car and Audio shop saw me struggling with the steering, so he decided to help me push. He was wearing a helmet. I thought to myself: this guy is cool. I called mom, she picked me up, we went to Kragen to get some oil (the remedy used for the previous issue with the same general symptoms), went back to the car. No luck. I called Triple-A. And then we enter part two of this saga.

It took a very long time for the tow truck to come. I already missed the first class by now, and my second class would soon pass if I didn’t get going soon. I got very bored sitting in my car. I had a chat with the parking lot security guard at First Bank. She was somewhat understanding, though I think that was partly due to her lack of intelligence. I went back to sitting in my car. Hmm… not much going on here. I started thinking about random things, like: if I was homeless and could only travel thirty feet from the car in any direction, where would I live? I thought of the alley. Nope. Creepy people live in alleys. I would be a non-creepy homeless guy. Then I noticed a pine tree that had a thick layer of pine needles underneath. Perfect for a bed. There was some undergrowth to provide protection from predators as well as noise from the traffic. That’s where I would live if I could only use a thirty foot radius for available living quarters. I even took a picture of it with my marvelous camera phone.

I continued sitting in my car. I saw a GT3 pass by, but that just made me feel embarrassed. Embarrassed because the driver of the Porsche was sitting behind the wheel of an automobile that does more than just work. And I am sitting behind the wheel of a broken car with rust spots on the hood. How embarrassing!

The tow-truck finally arrived, minutes before I lapsed into semi-permanent insanity. When the driver stepped out, he looked exactly like Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite. I thought: this guy is cool. That thought quickly vanished as I hopped into the cab and he turned on the radio to the station that played “You’re Still the One” by Shania Twain (I didn’t know who that song was by, I had to google it. Never you mind). And he left it on that station until we arrived at the autoshop in Goleta. Miller, the auto technician, ran a few tests to determine that the spark was normal and all the tubings were connected, etc., but determined that the problem existed in the fuel pump. That meant that I had to steal the car from mom. Luckily, her office is just a few block away from the autoshop, so I ran over there and waited for her to arrive. Driving to school in the minivan, I felt a little embarrassed. This time I was actually behind the wheel of an automobile that works. But it is a minivan. Oh well.

I managed to arrive at school with about five minutes remaining in my second class (Music Appreciation), so I decided to head over to my third class (Political Thinking). I met some people outside the class, so we talked a bit about the reading. It was the highlight of the day. So far. Class started as usual, and all went well (albeit slightly chilly inside the class room) until the largest fat kid arrived late. He is usually late and always walks about one third the speed of an average man his age. Already disrupting the fascinating lecture, he sat down in the front row, breaking the chair that he sat upon. Instantaneously, a few nuts and bolts flew a few feet away adding an additional sound effect. Dr. Eskandari, the professor, immediately yelled at him and another later girl for disrupting the lecture. The fat kid got up and sat down carefully on another chair, though I still feel the pain of the chair. There was an eerie and awkward silence from the audience for about a minute, while people were biting their tounges trying not to laugh. The moderately cute girl who sits next to me (and also has a Tool shirt) let out a faint sound of a muffled laugh, so I glared at her until she shrugged while mouthing “wha happen?”. This was the new high point of my day.

The lecture continued, but somehow we managed to get talking about the myth that claims that Aldous Huxley died (on LSD) in Isla Vista. Somehow this quote came out of Dr. Eskandari’s mouth: “you need to read Aldous Huxley on LSD”. Okay, so we either need to read a book called “Aldous Huxley on LSD”, or read books by Aldous Huxley, on LSD. That class is great.

Anyway, my car is still in the shop and I still have a cold. w00t.

I figured I should try out this blog thing.