Misery Loves Company

Hello everyone,

When I discovered this blog a few months ago, I felt like I'd stumbled upon a really great small-town pub. Kind of dark, a little rough around the edges. My kind of place.

I'm a full time, tenured proffie at a small community college, located in the rainier nether regions of the Left Coast. I am another one of those damned liberal arts majors who dares to believe her field is as worthwhile to society as oh, Division 1A football or Chemical Engineering.

My school is located in one of the more economically depressed pockets of an economically depressed state. Student numbers have doubled in the past seven years--and full time faculty positions have been reduced by 15% in the past twelve years. We've had revolving doors installed in key administration offices. We're on our sixth president, 8th or 9th sets of VPs, and hell, I've lost count of deans. So the merriment is fairly never-ending.

This week has been eternal. I spent the weekend attempting to assess the small amount of original thought in a particularly frightful collection of research papers. Apparently I need to explain in more detail what plagiarism checking software is looking for.

But there are little twinkling highlights: this morning, one of my flakes had on a shirt that said "This man needs a beer." I said "you and me both, Bucky," as I handed out some papers. After class, there was a knock on my office door. Said flake was at the door, holding out a bottle that looked to be half full of...urine?? "Here," he said, "this is some stuff I had leftover from my camping trip last weekend. It's apple pie flavored; I make it with Everclear. Girls really like it!"

This girl drinks Maker's Mark, bubba. With grown ups.