A Moment of Silence, Please

I'm not very good at math, but last term I had 17 credits and 30 hours of work. This term, I have 14 credits and 33 hours of work. Last term was difficult, but I managed to get homework done and watch "Lost" and do laundry on a fairly regular basis. I know it's only the first week, but the laundry is already stacking up, I'm only just now understanding that transitivo verbi hanno avere e intransitivo verbi hanno essere, except that I'm having trouble remembering how to conjugate avere and essere (tu .... erm ... sei?), and I missed "Lost" so I don't know Mr. Eko's back-story.

And this makes me cranky. So I'm taking my 10 minutes of free time (I have to go to work after this) to blog because blogging ... um ... does something to make me not cranky. I think.

This term's class assessment:
Italian 102 -- I like our instructor, Claudia, because she's good natured and has only lived in the US for 4 years, so she understands when we have trouble with Italian because she still has trouble with English. However, she seems to forget sometimes that we can't keep up with her and suddenly a flow of verbi comes rushing out ending with "bene?" and most of the time I can only reply "no. male. repititi?"

History 105 -- the worst. I don't like the professor (which doesn't matter because he seems to like himself enough for everyone) and being told on the first day "a lot of you don't know how to write because the computer does it for you now" really rubbed me the wrong way. Which leads me to...

Writing 122 -- this is going to be a challenge and I'm really looking forward to it. I feel a little cheated by Mike last term, because he was fooled by the prose and let me get away with a lot of weak argumentation. (Honestly, saying that James Ellroy used racial slurs in "LA Confidential" to make a point about seedy characters vs good characters ... I can't believe he bought that -- there are no good characters in "LA Confidential.") This new instructor, Matt, has already whittled the class in half by his first day speech of expectations (he ended each one with "if that doesn't sound like something you're interested in, I suggest that you drop this class") and the essays we're reading are much more in depth than Dave Barry cracking jokes about grammar usage. If I swing an A in this one, it's not going to be because I have a "great prose style", that's for sure.