...to break some ice and throw some stones

One word: rage.  This is another classic diatribe - a rant of unreasonable proportions.  Read at your own risk; no feelings shall be spared here.  I told one of my students yesterday that graduate school is 10% about what you learn there in terms of academics and 90% about being able to survive bullshit politics and insufferable people whose insecurities are shadowed only by their enormous posturing and classic over-compensating megalomaniacal behaviors.  How sad is that?  The English department at DU (save a few kind - and I assume abused - souls) quite simply eats its young and I cannot comprehend this; aren't senior scholars supposed to be refilling the ranks of scholarship with exciting new people to keep the torch burning?  Instead many of them opt to sadistically inflict a bizarre hazing ritual upon those who follow them simply because they at one time felt they had to survive a similar type of situation; maybe these people are simply the bullied who now get to be bullies; maybe they're all just crazy fuckbags who need a life.  Who knows these things?

So I'm supposed to be meeting with my committee about my dissertation tomorrow, and I made this arrangement at least a month ago and have been planning for it.  I went the first round of my prospectus draft feeling like a total idiot because my director loved it and my second reader hated it.  My second reader is one of the fucking annoying people in this department who apparently believes that all things should be done to her satisfaction and in her way regardless of interest or intent or future plans or - whatever.  Sadly, she is one of many who are currently at the head of this department and make our collective grad student lives a constant exercise in futility and frustration.  I could recount the myriad wrongs and injustices of the last three years, but I simply don't have the time to compose a list that long.  In any case, I opted to revise the prospectus with this person in mind in order to pave the way for my release from this wretched sentence of doctoral years, and I even resorted to employing writing I had done for her previously that she loved and said would make a great project.  Now, she doesn't like it.  It's enough that I'm writing about violence and allegory in early modern drama, but now she thinks I should say something about Erasmus.  ERASMUS?!  And do you know why she thinks I should write about this?  Because SHE wrote about it and suggested I read HER article that she published about it - who does this?  What kind of egomaniac resorts to such shameless self-promotion to a student at my level? 

Furthermore and while I'm at it - fuck rhetoric and theory too.  Several people in this department are certain that all things are about rhetoric and that we should all be rhetoricians and that we should care about rhetorical theory and critical inquiry models and teaching students what enthymemes are - AUGH!  So really, what this $40,000 a year in tuition, private-school education is getting me is the same shit as any other public university might offer except that these folks are even more self-involved and pretentious.  I simply cannot wait to have my degree and a position somewhere at a university where I can promise to NEVER be this way.  Sorry if you're not following this anymore - DU folk will get it, others won't, but suffice it to say I'm sick to death of having to fight my way through shit.  I never asked for easy; I just want things to be doable.  I work hard, I teach well, and all I want is to do the work and graduate and go about my business of teaching and writing - what is so hard about that? 

Now, this second reader of mine - less than 24 hours before our meeting (which she calls a "defense" by the way) - she sends me notes on my draft so that I "can be prepared for her questions tomorrow" - like I'm defending myself against her or something because she's decided that my project isn't what she would have it be?  Because I haven't applied "rhetorical theory" or included Erasmus or read her fucking article?  Then I read the comments and they're ridiculously out of touch, don't make any sense, and frankly only prove that she has no idea what I'm writing about.  And oh, by the way, she's the only fucking one who doesn't!  I don't often brag, but what I'm writing about is cool shit even by academic standards and it's interesting and edgy and I have no intention whatsoever in fighting this woman all the way to her ultimate rejection of my dissertation because she sees the world differently.  AHHHHHHGGGG.  (<--That's a frustrated scream, by the way).  I should cancel the meeting tomorrow, but I don't know what I'll say, and if I change readers at this point I have to explain myself; once I explain myself, it's my master's program all over again.  Me, the boat-rocker, the rabble-rouser, the one who can't just shut her fucking mouth and go on about it.  Oh no.  I have to be the one who makes a statement, who says "you're a fucking jerk and I won't suffer you any longer" and then I can be black-listed at yet another Colorado university.  Not that I would have anything to do with DU once I'm out of here, but still.  I don't want to be that person.  But I have to stand up for myself and I won't let someone bully me.  That was third-grade me; 36-year-old me is pissed as shit and taking names.  If I have to draw a line in the sand, then by god I'll do it.

And this is me after a long walk and a hard gym workout; you should have heard me before that.

AHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.