ranting swede: people in authority

My tutor for Software Construction is a moron. Not only did he take forever to mark our assignments (and I use the word mark very loosely here), but then when teh results were finally released I saw that he hadn't reversed any of the results that the other tutors had reversed: (background: The lecturer in charge of the course tested for a number of things not covered in the spec and was ridiculously strict on the automarking guidelines). So now I need to write him a polite email asking him to look at them for me when really what I want to say is something along the lines of YOU LAZY MORON FIX MY AUTOTESTS FOR ME OR I WILL KILL YOU. Ahem.


At work this morning one of the guys left early because he didn't feel well. He told me that he couldn't find our boss and to pass on that he'd left for the above-mentioned reasons. The following conversation followed between me and my boss.

Me: Hey, [the guy's name] left early because he wasn't feeling well
Boss: Why didn't he find me to tell me?
Me: He tried!
Boss: Where was I?
Me: I don't know O_o

Cos ya know, if any of us knew maybe he would have found you..


From the bus on the way home I looked out the window and saw a guy walking with his kid. What made it special was how the kid was wearing a harness with a leash attached, held by his father. I would say more here but I really do think the image speaks for itself.

Goals

I joke around a lot with my friends about how I'm never going to graduate. But really, half the reason I'm not rushing is because I have no idea what I'm going to do once I do. And I look around at my fellow employees at Coles, especially the ones who've been there forever, and I wonder whether they feel like their lives are fulfilling at all. Today an older woman came back to work after a five week break. I asked her how she was, and her response was something like "good, but not I'm back in this hellhole. You would think I'd find another job while I was on break."

While I'm at uni I have a concrete goal to be working towards, namely that of graduating. While I'm working towards said goal I can put up with any number of mundane and boring other things (such as working at Coles) because it's all just killing time until I can realise said goal. But then if I do graduate, what then? Would I be able to deal with having nothing but a day job forever? Unless I could somehow find the hypothetical dream job that would provide a goal in itself and cause me to wake up happy to go and spend another day there..
What reasons do people have for continuing on? I already know that I don't intend to have children, and even if I did I'm not sure even they would be enough not to be overwhelmed by the constant sameness and the knowledge that this is all there is. My hobbies are interesting enough but not enough to provide my reason for existence. Maybe I'll end up being one of those perpetual students, except that then I would need to keep myself in denial and always plan to be leaving any day now, because the moment I realised that this is all there is... I suppose in this sense religious people have the best deal because they'll always have that goal to work towards.

I guess these thoughts were also partially inspired by The Namesake, the movie I saw a couple of days ago, where the idea of freedom was an overarching theme. Most of the characters feel hemmed in, sometimes by the US culture they live in, sometimes by their Bengali traditions, sometimes by the relationships they have with other people. At the end both the mother and the son find freedom in their own ways, and so do the people around them. I want to be free in that way, where they both reach that point where they're not just being pushed around by what they feel they should be doing but finally know what they want to do with themselves and are at peace with themselves. "Following your bliss" is the phrase they use towards the end.



yeh, I know I've been blogging way too much lately...it's a combination of boredom, dissatisfaction and having enough free time to write about it all.