HA!

I clipped this from a longer post over at RateYourStudents--a sanity saver to me when I'm overwhelmed with the semester and my other lives, like I am right now. The best ones come from an old semi-retired prof they've dubbed "Wicked Walter." WW tells it like it is, no holds barred (probably because he has tenure and a retirement plan and the site is, well, anonymous). Fellow English grads will especially appreciate the humor:

Oh, and English profs. They're delicious. English departments are where dreams go to die, right? I mean these English profs always have the nice Shakespearean fonts on their websites, a big quill next to their unbelievably white faces. They're always writing about how summer will bring them to England or Scotland,where they will trudge down some muddy trail to where Wordsworth once smoked a big bowl, or where Coleridge once ate a beaver because he thought it was Mary Shelley...

...And I won't even get started on the whole insular world that is academic blogging, with all the above inanities tagging each other with memes. "I tag WonderProf and TeachingSuperstar with this newest meme: 5 authors you'd like to poke with a stick and 5 sexual positions you could get into where it'd be easiest to revise your un-sellable and boring dissertation."

...Finally, a special shout out to those cretins on the job path. Oh, they are lovely, sweet dears, so persecuted, so incredibly sure that the system is out to spoil their chance at success...all the search committees have ganged up to find ways to make them unhappy, and when they do get interviews, they imagine senior faculty
Stanley is flicking boogers at them, and not playing along with the modus operandi which is supposedly: "We welcome you and your intellect, and can't wait for you to show us how it's done, you 27 year old fucktard."

el-oh-el.

What I like about RYS is that it comes from real people in the business of academia. God, I'd love to put some faces to names. If we did, maybe we'd all have less reason to rant anonymously. Semester stress. I has it.

-- Virgil