Grad School: A Primer

A is for Anxiety. Who are you, Derrida?

B is for the Bore you are, to all but Ma and Pa.

C is for the Coin you drop on Copies you deface,

D for the Despair you feel, producing at this pace.

E is for the Energy you wasted all these years,

F for Fraud, for Failure, Fake, whatever, these are tears.

G is for the Game you play, imagining you'll finish,

H for Harry Potter. You fancy games of Quiddich.

I's for Isolation, you're alone in this you know?

J for all the Joy you'll feel in this Hell when it snows.

K is for the grade you'd give, to see that student sob,

L for Lucky, like you'll be, to ever Land a job.

M is for the Money you'd be rolling in by now,

N for all the Notes you lost, although you're not sure how.

O is for the wailing, which continues in your sleep,

P for all the Pressure, which you handle [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP].

Q is for the Questions, all the dumb ones that you ask,

R for the Revisions, Resubmissions in your past.*

T is for the Time spent, reading this instead of that,

U for Unproductive, like the time spent with your cat.

V is for the Virtues you can always cultivate,

When you have a real life.  At some undetermined date.

X is for the ones you love, but avoid for your cause,

Y for you, you you you you, and working without pause.

Z is for the Žižek, he's really rad, I hear,

And now you know, Grad ABCs, who here wants more beer?

*S is for the Shit you inevitably leave out,
Or maybe for how stupid, you feel foot firm in mouth.

Comments

[N. Pepperell]

I might hazard a guess that you're perhaps having a week like mine... ;-P Hang in there... :-)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Then he almost fell flat on his face on the floor
When he encountered more letters galore!
Letters that he'd never dreamed of before!

The most appropriate quote from On Beyond Zebra! seems to be:

"I've a letter called FLUNN. And the FLUNN is for Flunnel
A softish nice fellow who hides in a tunnel.
He only comes out of his hole, I'm afraid,
When the right kind of softish nice music is played
On a kind of a hunting horn called the o'Grunth.
And to learn how to play it takes month after month
Of practising, practising. Isn't much fun-th.
And, besides, it's quite heavy. Weighs almost a tun-th.
That's why few people bother to play the o'Grunth
So the Flunnel's been out of his tunnel just one-th"

[uncomplicatedly]

Lovely! Thanks for making a hard day of unrewarding labor a little more amusing.

P.S. My Ma and Pa thought they wanted to read my master's thesis, until they actually tried to do so and... got bored. Sigh.

[Brendan]

Don't quite know why but that's fantastic and uplifting!

Thanks Scott.

[itinerarium]

With only minor alterations (to G and L), I'm afraid to say that having landed the job, none of these have substantially changed. But from isolative despondency comes either great productivity or unfortunate drinking habits.

[ben wolfson]

UCI must have a really weird grading scale.

[Tim Lacy]

Funny! But I don't get 'K'. What am I missing? I thought that entry would fall under 'F', but you already had one there. - Tim

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Odd that the "K" is so controversial -- certain members of the Kaufman household were also baffled by it -- but all I mean by it is the old copy-room standby:

"What are you doing?"

"Copying sample essays. Here's the A, the B..."

"Which one is that?"

"The K."

[ben wolfson]

If you like, I can pick on another letter. For instance, I thought that O should have ended with -uck or -it or something of that nature; you know, so that the [BLEEP]s in P would actually seem like censorship.