cover your heads
So I was deleting old crap from my gmail account, you know, like you do -- mostly old messages from the Penn CFP listserv, back when it worked -- and found this thing I apparently wrote in 2005, emailed to myself, and forgot about.
No matter where. Of leisure no man speak:
Let's talk of books, and notes, and references,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write funding applications on the earth.
Let's choose committees and talk of exams,
And yet not so, for what can we discuss
Save why we spent the semester slacking off?
Our time, our lives, and all belong to work,
And nothing can we call our own but stress,
And that small carrel in the library
Which serves as cell, and hiding place for books.
For God's sake let us haunt the campus bar
And tell sad stories of the fate of grads:
How some have sought real jobs, some drained their funds,
Some lingering for years as ABD;
Some with their doctorates, yet still unhired;
All burnt out -- for within the academe
To which we've given life and sanity
Holds Stress a chair: and there the antic sits,
Piling on papers, mocking our research,
Allowing us no breath, nay, not an hour
To take a break, chill out, and surf the net;
Infusing us with guilt and vain conceit
That this poor flesh which walls about our life
Ought not to sleep or eat; and, humored thus,
Comes at the last, and with a scarlet pen
Scrawls on our drafts: "This makes no fucking sense!"
I obviously didn't finish it, but the email I sent myself suggests that it was apparently supposed to end "How can you say to me that I am smart?"
No matter where. Of leisure no man speak:
Let's talk of books, and notes, and references,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write funding applications on the earth.
Let's choose committees and talk of exams,
And yet not so, for what can we discuss
Save why we spent the semester slacking off?
Our time, our lives, and all belong to work,
And nothing can we call our own but stress,
And that small carrel in the library
Which serves as cell, and hiding place for books.
For God's sake let us haunt the campus bar
And tell sad stories of the fate of grads:
How some have sought real jobs, some drained their funds,
Some lingering for years as ABD;
Some with their doctorates, yet still unhired;
All burnt out -- for within the academe
To which we've given life and sanity
Holds Stress a chair: and there the antic sits,
Piling on papers, mocking our research,
Allowing us no breath, nay, not an hour
To take a break, chill out, and surf the net;
Infusing us with guilt and vain conceit
That this poor flesh which walls about our life
Ought not to sleep or eat; and, humored thus,
Comes at the last, and with a scarlet pen
Scrawls on our drafts: "This makes no fucking sense!"
I obviously didn't finish it, but the email I sent myself suggests that it was apparently supposed to end "How can you say to me that I am smart?"