Prelude To A Riot

Last night, in Biz class, Erica was studying the lists of classes for next semester.

"D Clearances are tomorrow," she said. That is, the day in which we get the permissions to register for various classes (which we do a different day).

Oh damn, that's right. I remembered the last hilarious experience I had with getting D clearances. Last April I got there at 4:30am and I was number 10 in line.

Last night someone put up a list (and then left it). At 9pm, when I signed it, I was number 50. I said, and many people there agreed with me, that the list wasn't going to last if the people there -- and I knew some people were going to camp out all night -- had anything to say about it.

I thought about what classes I wanted to take. There weren't very many classes to choose from, a fact that is making many of us crazy, considering we're graduating and need to get the units.

I got up at 4:30am and got to USC at 5am this morning.

I was number 88 in line.

Of the first 10 in the line, 6 were second-year, graduating GSP students. You know, the people who should be guaranteed places in the writing classes, but who can't be. It's insane.

There's little to no room in the area around the area where we have to do the D clearances, so the 88 of us were packed in like sardines, and getting tighter by the second.

By 7 in the morning, 150 people were in line, and there was no sign of Bruce Springsteen on the horizon to justify this kind of insanity.

At 8:30 in the morning, a woman from the D clearance office came out and took down the list of names -- the new list, started by the people who were there all night.

"You all have to get in line," she sneered at us. (I'm sorry, "sneer" is the only possible verb to use for her tone.) "I saw this list at 8:30 last night and no one was in line."

1 of her, 180 of us.

We were this close to a riot.

Someone managed to convince her that this was a different list, and people had been there all night.

So what did she do then, given that she had 180 people who'd been there for some time, who were annoyed with this whole process, who wanted to be done with this bureaucratic bullshit?

She took roll. The whole goddamn 180 names. Compleat with shushing of the crowd and striking off anyone's name if they didn't respond immediately. Considering you couldn't hear anything being said, it's not that surprising people couldn't hear their names. Some of the people whose names got struck off caused problems later on, screaming and generally slowing down the entire process, which wasn't exactly racing along to begin with.

I finally got done with the process around 11:30am. The part of the process I especially enjoyed was finally getting my name called, getting inside the D clearances offices, and...getting into another line. Then, finally, when I got in to see Julie, the adviser for the GSP program, I said, "You know, we all had to meet with you last week, couldn't we have done this then?"

You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

I came home, had lunch with Darin, Brent, and Harry, and then slept for 3 hours this afternoon.

Then I headed back to USC for Comedy Critical Studies. I only stayed for the lecture, coming back home to get some writing done, so I passed up Blazing Saddles and The Heartbreak Kid. Marc and Evan both say The Heartbreak Kid is on their Top 10, so I'm kind of bummed to miss it.

Of course, I came home and couldn't get word one of my ER script going, so I started writing on my thesis script again. I'm on page 63, by the way.