Leashes exist for a reason…
It was after my biology tutorial and I was walking to one of the buildings where I can go and get something to eat and meet up with one of my friends, I was walking with another one of my friends and this guy had this dog. He was holding onto the leash, which was not attached to the dog’s collar. And this was like… I’m going to say it was a large sized dog, even though I’m a horrible judge of canine sizes (it looked like a Rottweiler). So there’s this dog, and it comes up to me and starts barking at me and growling and showing its teeth and just blocking me from continuing walking forward. And you know that fight or flight response that we’re all supposed to have and it’s instinctual and all that? Yeah, I just froze and could not move. The guy didn’t even try to pull his dog away from me! My friend, J, was a few feet from me started to yell at the guy because he wasn’t doing anything and the guy just rolled his eyes and went “He won’t hurt anyone!” and she yelled at him some more to do something and he finally grabbed the dog by the collar and pulled the dog away.

I’ve actually gotten a lot better about my fear of dogs over the last few years, I’m pretty okay with dogs as long as they’re not… barking at me, trying to jump on me and (heh) as long as I can’t see all their teeth. And I thought I’d been doing pretty well with my fear of dogs. And then there was this dog and all the barking and the teeth and growling… -shudders-

Parenting, you’re really doing it wrong…
To the idiotic woman on the bus this morning who was scolding her toddler-aged daughter. If you want to scold your child for hair pulling, that’s fine. If you want to take away her toys or sweets, that’s perfectly fine. But picking up your toddler-aged daughter by the hair and then lifting her up so that her feet are able to dangle and then not setting her back down, even though she’s crying and trying to get away from you, until everyone on the bus is yelling at you… Is so not the way to get your point across. Yes, hair pulling hurts. But lifting up a child by their hair in order to prove a point to them is just cruel. And… illegal. Yay for bus drivers who call for transit security, and telling you to get your butt off of their bus.

“OMFG, I can’t believe I failed the midterm!!!” (Not me, by the way.)
What I overheard my friend telling my other friend. Due keep in mind that a) she did not start studying until the day of the midterm (biology, I’ve blogged about it more than once already, haha), b) she did not even do a brief read-through of the lecture slides until the day of the midterm and c) she rarely shows up to class and when she does, she leaves early. And she was all like teary-eyed and saying how she completely ‘bombed’ the midterm (and after she showed me her grade, I have to concur – she did, in fact, completely bomb the midterm). It probably didn’t help that she got 0 for two of the questions (worth 8 and 10 marks, respectively). And then she was saying how she was hoping that the average was “really low” so that they’d scale it up (the midterm for 2008 had an average of ~50%, they scaled it up to ~60%). But the average for the 2009 midterm was ~65%, so no scaling will be done.

And… How was your Wednesday? I hope it went swimmingly!