By saying, "I don't have the strength to do it myself. Somebody please KILL ME NOW," I wasn't expressing a desire to kill myself. I was trying to make a joke because it's the first day of the semester and I thought I understood the humor of this page. Don't worry; it won't be a problem in the future.
- The Dupe in Dearborn
Oh, YEAH? Just you wait until your students stop being docile, and become organized and MILITANT. I'll bet your administration caves in like a house of cards: they always do.
ReplyDeleteJust you wait until you have come into your office a boy student who thinks that just slapping on more Axe body spray is a suitable substitute for washing. If you feel trapped now, that's NOTHING compared to realizing that if the Germans had used Axe body spray instead of chlorine at Ypres, we'd be speaking German today, ach du lieber Gott.
MY students can't do grade 4 shit, and disturbingly often, grade 2 shit. Last year, one of my students made the national news by being caught fucking a sheep. It's the main thing my university is known for currently. There's seemingly NO LIMIT to how low they can sink. When the day comes when one of the geeks really does bite the head off a live chicken, it won't surprise me a bit.
So, at least you now have the consolation that the problem isn't you. Nor are you the first one to notice it, even if every last fucking one of your colleagues seems like they're drinking hallucinogenic Kool-Aid.
I've been doing this for 15 years now. Why, in Heaven's name, do I keep at it? It's because I get to be an astronomer, with two observatories all to myself. Here in California, we get so much good weather I routinely turn my nose up at weather I would have jumped at the chance to use when I was an undergraduate in Chicago.
So, have you something similar, with which you can be creative? You did something for that Ph.D. of yours, didn't you? I suggest you have some fun doing whatever scholarly or creative activity you used to do. Your students are most assuredly doing theirs, disgusting as it can be.
Jokes aside, if you really are serious about the "Kill me now" part, perhaps you might spend a little time on the couch. It's worrisome.
Delete> Here in California, we get so much good weather I routinely turn my nose up at weather I would have jumped at the chance to use when I was an undergraduate in Chicago.
DeleteBrilliant. But you're making me nostalgic again.
I had a colleague kill himself several years ago and this "comedy" is inappropriate. You should be ashamed for publishing it.
ReplyDeleteJessica
What makes you think that the OP was joking?
DeleteSuicide is, indeed, not a joking matter, but this page is known for hyperbole. There are also occasional mentions of a desire to kill students (or at least do other, less seriously inappropriate things to them), and all available evidence suggests that no students have actually been harmed (and in some cases the proffie in question has headed back into the fray with some good suggestions for coping with the specific infuriating behavior in question).
DeleteI think Frod covered the bases pretty well above: some sympathy/perspective (it's like this more places than not), some very good suggestions for coping with the situation/keeping a professional identity alive in the long run if DinD is mostly venting, and a suggestion to seek appropriate medical help/support if the "I want to be dead" thoughts are getting a bit too real/frequent.
You aren't alone. We leave our graduate programs with Ph. D. in hand with visions of great things ahead of us...(research awards, directing talented, hungry graduate students).
DeleteReality: we end up spending most of our time either teaching remedial stuff or spending all of our prep time for an "out of area" class we are roped into teaching because the specialist quit.
You aren't alone.
It's official. We're humorless fucks. This place used to be so much fun.
ReplyDelete-Glenn
I think it speaks volumes for the state of the profession. Notice that, whenever I advocate stapling dicks to the floor, no one takes it literally. Suicide is different.
ReplyDeletewait, you didn't mean it? Damn. And i put it in my syllabus and everything..
DeleteFrod, I've always had a serious problem with your 'stapling dicks to the floor' statements, because the average office stapler simply doesn't have staples with long enough legs (yes, that's the official name of that part of the staple) to fully penetrate the diameter of an average dick and anchor it to a floor. In order to get staple legs long enough, you need the large hand-lever-cranked stapler that very few departmental offices now carry, and are usually anchored to an office counter and not mobile enough to be taken to a classroom, and even with those it is questionable that the legs are long enough. Having accidentally fully inserted a staple into one of my fingers (I was 6 years old at the time, so the fingers were even smaller than those of a typical university student), I am speaking from real-world experience here, not some flight of fancy. Finally, unless you teach in one of the quaint old buildings at a university that has quaint old buildings still endowed with ancient floor boards that creak endearingly as you walk over them, the classroom floor is typically linoleum over concrete, and you can't get a staple to penetrate such a solid floor whereby the dick will remain stapled.
DeleteMAam: OK, I confess: I only staple dicks to the floor for cases who really deserve it, and they are relatively uncommon.
DeletePoopiehead: In fact, I actually do have a heavy-duty, industrial grade staple gun in my office: no kidding. It shoots staples with 2-inch legs, easily enough for 150 pages. Considering how cases deserving to be stapled to the floor tend to have smaller dicks anyway, attaching them into linoleum-over-concrete presents no problem. It's also amazing how much physics and engineering can be circumvented by sheer determination. (TWITCH!!!) But then, given sufficient determination, even a common office stapler can do, in a pinch.
I have a pneumatic stapler attachment for my air compressor. Should be no problem for dicks, janes, or anyone else.
DeleteI don't GET why people don't GET this page, and I don't GET why we're always scrambling to make sure nobody is offended.
ReplyDelete90% of everything that we were good at is gone. I keep coming back for the occasional good bit, but, Jesus, it's worse than the Crampicle most days. Please don't flame me. I'm delicate like everyone else!
No, I'm not.
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DeleteIf the censoriousnesss of academia today worries you now, just you wait until the Trump administration. All the new hires at Homeland Security will need to see is that copy of "It Can't Happen Here" by Upton Sinclair on my shelf, and I'll be off to the reactivated Manzanar. I'd been meaning to read the Koran: now I'll get my chance, and chances are quite good I'll finish it pre-trial.
DeleteOh, by the way: MERRY CHRISTMAS!
DeleteThat would be Sinclair Lewis (for "It Can't Happen Here"), in case anyone is keeping score at home.
DeleteLewis's cynicism is THE best, by the way. I think it would resonate very strongly, as they say, with most of the habitués of this site.
Thanks for pointing that out. I'll keep it in mind when I'm being forcibly sodomized by felons in the maximum-security prison they'll be throwing me in, for being an intellectual.
DeleteIf you would just post content and stop talking about how awful everything is maybe more people would read. No, never mind. This place jumped the shark years ago. I thought there was a new moderator. How come he's not doing anything.
ReplyDeleteModerators won't save you.
DeleteI wish everyone would stop trying to blame the moderator, and just realize that any social site is going to have it's share of crazy. Let it happen!
Well said Three Sigma. Yes, Crystal has done what she said she'd do. She's got the lights on. I see a new post every day or so. There's often a fuzzy graphic! It's here, it's available, and it could be whatever the readers wanted. You want to go all Wicked Walter, start writing your "crazzy" down and send it in.
ReplyDeleteI am always kicking myself about not doing that more and I am going to send something in this week since I (impossibly) started class today.
Damn straight. Anyone who complains about the site should have to provide content for the site.
DeleteHector