My morning was probably the most frustrating mornings in a long while because I had to deal with people who didn't know or care to learn the metric system. No understanding of what a base unit was, not even an attempt to educate themselves on what it was. Putting up with surreptitious glances over my shoulder was the most irritating. I hit my limit sometime around the end of class when a girl turned to ask if she could copy my work. The first words out of my mouth were something along the lines of:

"Might as well since other people have already looked over my shoulder for it."

Yes so maybe that wasn't the best way to become voted number one popular person in the class but that's not what I'm here for. Every other day I hear some bravado comment about yeah the government spends way too much or slamming two protons together is a waste of money and I feel disgusted.

These loud statements sound more akin to a squawking parrot repeating something it heard on the TV or radio. People regurgitating headline news or one-liners off the scrolling marquee of CNN does not suddenly make you an expert on the issue. No one even has the sense to question a bold statement; it's all emphatic nods or grunts of appreciation. They are supposed to be the generation after us? The same people who I watched puzzle over figuring out how to convert millimeters to kilometers by placing it on a balance.

I tried teaching one girl how to move the decimals over but she kept insisting that that's what she was doing. She was just putting the decimal in random points instead of stopping to look and see if her number actually made sense! How does 10 mL translate to 1 kL exactly? How? HOW? A ton of them kept trying to slide it pass me or the professor that they just put the decimals in the wrong places. One girl copied every conversion I had made when trying to show another person. She didn't bother to pay attention that it was all in scientific notation, so she wrote each number without the times ten to the power of whatever. It became clear once she took it to the professor, completely unaware that her conversions made no sense. The main frustration was that all of them didn't bother to figure out how to convert. Ten minutes would have been enough to go over it but no, someone muttering I'll just google it was the game plan for everyone.

Further ire was finding out Ben was having lunch with the same girl who doesn't know how to keep her sexual life secret. The conversation was apparently tame and superficial (according to Ben) but it still just rubs me the wrong way! She told him her roommate had started dating a guy for a couple of weeks and, through him, introduced a friend of his to her. So "something could be starting up" for her? Hooray? I didn't feel as ecstatic as Ben thought I would. I would much prefer they have a conversation that is, for once, completely devoid of her current or previous date/one-night stand/etc. (Obviously, hearing about this lunch did not help matters after the morning frustrations.)

The afternoon looked better save for this creepy moment where a man approached me and said that I was beautiful. Then he walked away. It could have been harmless save for the heebie-jeebies I felt immediately afterward. He was giving creepy vibes for sure...

Okay. Taking a moment to stop all of this furious typing. I'm positive I jumped around a lot in this entry but I suppose that's the whole reason for why it's called a rant? Right now, I'm sitting at a lone table in this cafe feeling a tiny bit guilty about how I responded to all this frustration: buying a chocolate muffin. I've most likely spoiled my appetite for dinner plus I wasted some time writing all of this out. Lesson learned and all that. It's time to just put my head down and weather all of this for just a little longer (months).