New camera

A church friend and should-be professional photographer has just bestowed upon me a most gloriously ancient film SLR to replace the piece of crap I have been using hitherto. The only problem is, I don't know how to use it. This fact becomes especially embarrassing when one remembers how I have complained for the past two months about the overly user-friendly features of the last piece of equipment. The first camera was a 35mm given to my aunt for her high school graduation, and was apparently quite a gift back in the day. The autofocus lens was considered a plus, as well. However, I griped endlessly about how autofocus was really nothing but an autolimitation of my creativity, and blamed the fuzzy images and poor compositions on the instrument. Now that I have a all-manual camera, I am officially out of excuses, my creativity being completely unfettered. No autofocus to hold me back now! Instead, the limitations have changed, the most prominent of which being my cluelessness as to how to even load the film.
I found a video online that I thought would help, but after repeated viewings and a thorough consultation of the manual, I still could not even open the back. The camera and its hippie-strap had me completely in love with it from the first moment, but I was quickly becoming angry at my own incompetence, and took it on the undeserving SLR.
"Camera, I am about to become very disenchanted with you," I warned, trying in vain to just get the darn thing open.
When it finally did, I over-followed the instructions of the quack on YouTube and managed to make the camera eat the film. Seriously eat it. I wound the entire footer of the film back into the canister, where it was absolutely irretrievable without breaking it open. Unwilling to blow a three-dollar roll of film, I grabbed the can opener and header for my parent's walk-in closet, where I pried off the top, pulled out the digested film, and did my best to reassemble the carcass. It worked surprisingly well, but the inevitable cracks in the canister meant that I would have to load the camera in the dark, which did not go over so well. I eventually gave up for the night, and my beautiful new camera has not left its bag since.