Academia: the Last Refuge of the Coward

I'm leaving in a week to go to far-off shores and have been desperately trying to figure out how to pack productively. I own no appropriate clothing for where I'm going, which I'll just have to work around, but of more concern is how I'm going to get some work done while I'm on the road. Various levels of my own cowardice and scheming have trapped me. Witness:

Problem the First: Serious issues of fear in regards to your intellectual abilities. Anxieties about revealing your complete incompetence to your peers.

Solution: Focus on an academic area in which there are no experts in the immediate vicinity. This has served me well. Going to a small Christian undergrad university and doing your honors thesis on "Post-Stonewall Depictions of Women in Gay Men's Literature" means that all your committee's going to be able to do is blink in confusion and give you an A.

Resulting Problem the Second: Nobody gives a crap about what you're studying, so the books are really obscure and hard to find. Also, you are a seriously cheap bastard.

Solution: Librariness. University libraries are required to keep around stupid useless texts that nobody cares about except for you. Which means you can check them out, renew them indefinitely, and no one will ever notice until you finish your dissertation and skip town.

Problem the Third: Travel. You're taking a long-ass trip, and you'll have plenty of time where you're forced to sit around doing nothing. An ideal time to catch up on all the reading you should have been doing all along. But, being a fine, upstanding citizen, you don't want to take along library books to a different continent. And the few books you do own on the topic were so damn hard to find you're sure as hell not going to risk losing them in an airport in Tokyo.

Solution: Drink heavily every single day until you leave on said trip, then haphazardly fling into a suitcase all of your underwear and some porn. Enjoy.


. . . okay, so solution is still in progress. GodDAMN, books are heavy.

(Setting: An idyllic glade. LECTURER sits in the clearing, alternatively scribbling furiously with a quill on parchment and gazing thoughtfully into the distance. TA enters, dancing in a manner to indicate sorrow. LECTURER and TA make eye contact. A tableau indicating tension)

TA: The students.

LECTURER: Fail them.

TA: I have grown to love their perversions.

LECTURER: Fail them.

TA: They think of me as their drunken sibling.

LECTURER: Set fire to them, THEN fail them.

TA: Have you lost your heart? Has your soul become reams of paper?

LECTURER: You're such a pussy. They're using you.

TA: . . .

LECTURER: How many As have you given out?

TA: Fuck, you're right. Should I not have prioritized teaching concerns over my own academic issues?

LECTURER: You DID that? You are SO fucked.

TA: *sobbing*

LECTURER: Aw, it's all right. I know your advisor. Come, we shall make merry and discover that Marx was not a Marxist.

TA: MustI fail them?

LECTURER: You may give them Ds.

(General merriment. TA and LECTURER exit, hand in hand, skipping. STUDENTS set fire to stage, oblivious of both the prancing couple and their own complete disregard for course requirements.)

FIN

No. 1: The Multiculturalist

My students took their final exam today and are deluging me with emails because they don't have the grades they want. I am, in turn, determinedly not wringing their necks. In celebration of this fact, I offer you a Great Moment in Teaching from my past.

Not long after the start of my first semester teaching, a student approached me after lecture. [The way this class was set up, there was a lecturer who spoke twice a week to three hundred students, said students then being broken up into about fifteen smaller groups that met with me and other TAs.] She explained to me that she would not be able to be in class on Friday, because of Rosh Hashanah.

Now, what I heard, in the midst of three hundred students packing up, was "I'm sorry, I can't be in class on Friday because of rush." As in, "I'm joining a sorority, so I have to take class off on Friday to go be in a pillowfight" or sock-filled-with-nickels-fight or drizzling-honey-and chocolate-all-over-other-girls-and-then-licking-it-off-fight. Whatever. I've never been in a sorority, so I have no idea.

Though if I were in charge of one, I know which way I would lean.

Anyway, some relatively lower-functioning part of the brain has processed this, and my head snaps completely upright, my left eyebrow shoots skywards, and I fix her in place with my very best evil eye. "This is not an acceptable reason to miss class," proclaims my evil eye (the left one). "And you are going to hell for thinking so." Such is the power of my gaze that nearby milk curdles. Neighborhood dogs are castrated. Walls shift uneasily out of my line of sight.

Student has actually retreated a step, eyes widening. "I wasn't going to go home at all," she squeaks, "but my uncle died."

Go home? I think. Why would she - ? And then my brain puts all the syllables together:
Ohhhh, rosh-ha-SHA-na . . .

"Oh, right," I say, the eyebrow returning to heel. "Sure. No problem."

I can see the realization in her eyes as she continues to back away: Only death can appease this TA. She eventually turns and flees, once she's at a safe distance. Leaving me feeling foolish and boogieman-like and wanting to call after her, "Hey, I'm really sorry! We don't have Jews where I'm from!"

She later dropped the course. I wrote up a couple scripts in my head about her being too distraught over her uncle's death to continue with the class, rather than being totally horrified by my refusal to acknowledge her faith.

So I've been cranked into high gear recently, grading students' papers and writing final seminar papers of my own. When I do this, I like to watch movies. Preferably bad (or at least relatively mindless) movies. This is actually a bonus for my students; no matter how bad their papers are, their writing still looks good next to Sorority House Massacre II. And it's a bonus for me, because when I get really bored and frustrated, I can just immerse myself in a few minutes of Slugs: The Movie and emerge refreshed. Fortunately, I've got a limited free supply of VHS tapes that allows me to indulge this hobby. (The tapes are another story all together.)

So I happend to run out of complete crap the other night and moved on to better-calibre action movies. And had another "Oh, Jesus, I've been in school too long" moment. I was about half an hour into Mad Max II/The Road Warrior when I found myself becoming increasingly offended.

"Look at this," I said to myself. "This movie is all about the threat of communal living and alternative sexualities. Mel Gibson might as well have 'HETERONORMATIVITY' stamped on his forehead."

"I mean," I continued some minutes later as I explained this to my housemate. "Just look at the action on the screen. Mel Gibson is driving a truck with a kid and a woman in it, trying to defeat a guy wearing assless chaps who's after Mel for having killed his gay lover."

"It's so obvious," I continued on Instant Messenger after said housemate stopped feigning interest. "The obviously heteronormative colonists try to tempt Mel Gibson to come with them by saying there'll be opportunities for breeding. Breeding, for god's sake! And they're all wearing white and the gay-ass bikers all have mohawks and hug each other on their motorcycles!"

"Fine," I muttered to myself after being advised that I probably needed to shut the hell up. "But there's an angry conference paper going to be written about this totally offensive, anti-queer, anti-liberal piece of trash!"

Yeah, I've been in grad school too long. It's made me incapable of enjoying things.

I eventually calmed down, though, came to terms with the fact that I was overanalyzing and forgetting the really important, up-front information the movie was presenting: A) gay anarchist bikers are stupid because they wear black leather in the desert, and B) hair-crimping technology will survive the apocalypse.

I'm sorry, Mad Max. I forgot to come to you with a child's heart and love your 'splosions.

Today, I submitted a graduate-level seminar paper which referenced Randy Quaid twice.

I love the humanities.

First of all, this is not my fault. Oh, no. This is the fault of all those people who asked me, "So what do you want to be when you grow up?"

(Especially the ones who gently disillusioned me when I said, "A kitty!" You bastards can rot in hell.)

Your brain takes "What do you want to be?" and slowly processes it through years of schooling and wedgies and underage drinking, until suddenly you're a legal adult. Then you wake up one morning surrounded by empty vodka bottles and unmatched socks, and you realize, "Shit, I don't have a career."

See, your brain has betrayed you. It's processed the input from all those people who told you you couldn't grow up to be a kitty and told you that it's not enough to just have a job. A wonderful, beautiful, meaningless string of jobs that you take, use, and release like a series of sorority girls. No, you've got to be something. You've got to have a career.

"Shit," you say to yourself. "I'm not ready to choose a career. What if I choose the wrong one? I better go back to school."

And this is where the stupid starts. "As long as I'm in school," says your brain, "I'm not an adult." Perhaps you further this illusion by wearing the same clothing you wore in high school, even past the point where the faded dates on them begin to disturb those around you. "As long as I'm in school," says your brain, "I'm avoiding picking a career." Whereas really what you're doing, the longer you stay in school, is becoming so specialized in something that you're unfit for anything else.

On some level, you know this. A tiny voice tells you. But you drown it out because now that you're over 21 and still in school, why, every year is like senior year! The future is open and the beer is legal!

Your brain just introduced itself as the son of a deposed Nigerian dictator wanting to cut you in on the deal of a lifetime, and you bought it, baby.

Oh, well. At least I still fit into my high school yearbook T-shirt.