Academia: the Last Refuge of the Coward

I sign up to teach the course, and I already know it's going to happen. I talk about texts involving race or sexuality, and damn . . . my students try so hard, but they're just . . . I mean, it's kind of adorable, because they don't even know they're being offensive.

"Audre Lorde wishes she weren't Black, because it's terrible."
(Did you capitalize "black" to disguise the fact that that was totally wrong?)

“The narrator of the Invisible Man wants to be judged by people just as they would judge someone of the opposite race.”
(And here I thought there were more than two races. My bad.)

“American women realized they had to choose between being frustrated housewives, or being successful but lonely and ugly.”
(I'm not sure if I should worry more or less because you're female.)

"He ‘hugs & kisses’ the U.S b/c he is proud that the U.S. is a free country & people are accepting of such things as gayism."
(I'm starting a new discipline: Gayism Studies! Who's with me?)

"The difference between regular poetry and Native American poetry is that I don't like Native American poetry."
(Shine on, you crazy diamond.)

CowardlyAcademe: Hey, thanks for taking the time to meet with me. I really need an advisor for my dissertation. What are you doing for the next couple of years?

Professor: No. You're not really working in my area of expertise.

CowardlyAcademe: Oh. Okay, well -

Professor: Also, your idea for proposal is really interesting, but you can't write it. You should have talked to someone before you started.

CowardlyAcademe: Um. Oh?

Professor: It's too narrow and not good for employability.

CowardlyAcademe: I . . . have you SEEN what other people in the department are doing? What - okay, never mind. Will you be my advisor if I change it?

Professor: No.

CowardlyAcademe: Okay. Can you recommend someone else I can talk to?

Professor: Not until you change your project.

CowardlyAcademe: So . . . I can't write my proposal until I get an advisor, but I can't get an advisor until I write my proposal?

Professor: (Reveals self to be Yog-Sothoth.)

CowardlyAcademe: (Goes mad.)

Seriously. There's all the joy of being able to rely on bullshit to get you through any career situation, without having to have any of the real creativity that the really professional liars (writers) do.

I'm currently in the middle of four major projects. One of these is my dissertation proposal, which is gonna be awesome because none of the people at my university of choice have done any work in it. I could make up all these damn books and they'd have no clue. Excellent. One of these projects is a conference paper about 50's B horror movies that I'm revamping so it actually matches the title when I present it next week. I really like the title. One is a conference paper I'm trying to write so I can write a proposal about it, though I guess I could always just do what I did last year, which is write a proposal for a paper that doesn't exist, then throw all the books in my runk, drive to the conference, and write the whole paper in the hotel room the day before. This one's mostly inspired by Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to work in a clip. And finally, because I have the attention span of a toaster, I'm doing some hot hot hot NaNoWriMo action. My novel is about zombies.

Academia's not just for cowards who can't face the real world. It's also for fandom refugees who finally moved out of their parents' basement but can't hang out with their old buddies any more because they "totally sold out" when they started investing all of their money in tuition rather than pewter figurines.