Readers, don’t worry, these are catharsis posts. I realize how Gothic they sound but I have absorbed many decades of dire warnings and discouraging words. Every post in which I expel my hatred for the various weak beings with whom I have attempted diplomacy as they tried to pull me into the graves they sleep in, makes me more competent in real life so I am going for it.
All my life I have been lectured about what “the real truth” was, and what it would be if I continued in graduate school, what it is. I have been constantly warned that if I finished my degree and got a job, I would not be allowed to teach freshmen. I would have to undertake research, and write, and publish. That was why I should quit.
People truly wishing to discourage me should have told me that I would teach, forever, the courses I got the M.A. (not to mention the Ph.D) so as not to have to teach any more. They should have told me that I would teach as many as four sections of such courses per term, with computerized homework served from Cupertino, which I would check off in little data boxes. They should have told me I would teach these courses to unprepared students and that there would be interminable internecine fighting about “methodology,” over which careers would be made and lost. They could have convinced me to leave graduate school with that.
These were people who, to hear them talk, had hoped to teach part time at community colleges or maybe small liberal arts schools, but had been forced to work full time at R1 institutions. They were suffering and are suffering. They preach about the most correct political pose to strike. They are barely able to creep to their well stocked libraries and write a few words. Suffering bitchez, I am not only smarter, stronger, and better looking than you, I am also having more fun and doing actual political work.
Suffer, suffering bitchez. Suffering was a bad ideal in graduate school and a worse one for a professor. You liked it, though — insisted upon it, clung to it — and now you have it. While you struggle to get anything done, yet spend time discouraging others, I glide through the universe on golden wings. I will close your graves and sing my most sublime songs.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Now, now.
Haha – now I realize you may be saying now, now as one does to a petulant child but the way I read that originally was now, now! as in do it now, not later! And I liked that. To it I say it is now, I am just writing these posts to keep evil spirits off me. 🙂
On June 8, 2012
🙂