The tenured aristocracy.

I'm getting more and more fed up with the tenured aristocracy.


I sit in class as a freshman writing TA, and though I grade half the kids' fucking papers, I make a third of the money, maybe less, and with much more instability.


It also pisses me off since if I could have just slid over this financial hump and actually got into applications and secured a position, I could have been teaching the class as well, which I'm perfectly capable of doing at this point in time.


I've very much enjoyed my library job too, but lately when I've been shelving books, I keep thinking, "Who returned this, some tenured f*ck whose career I'm propping up with my work?", and it makes me sick to think that they get to research while I have to scrape for money, including by shelving the books they glanced at.


Honestly, more and more I feel like a trapped indentured servant, teaching and correcting and shelving for these assholes who don't appreciate what I do and who I can never become, since the tenure track promise is broken.


I simply cannot wait to be out of this negative atmosphere.


Also, the atmosphere of higher ed is getting shittier and shittier and much less enjoyable, so although I'm sad becuase of the trends towards inequality, it doesn't bother me at all that the jobs of tenure-track profs are getting more and more unpleasant.

Those people deserve it.

Income inequality on campus.

Just the other day my freshman writing supervisor said that the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" on campus is getting wider in society and is now becoming much more visible on campus, too...


I had had some very weird dynamics last year in sections where students were treating me like a servant in evaluations, and after I did some (tactful) pedagogy on income inequality (treat feedback like any other, be non-judgmental, clue in larger contexts, all in less than 5 minutes so as to not use up much classtime at all), 2 students complained to the prof, who bitched me out for it and left a nasty note in my file, I guess.


(The supervisor was on board with my pedagogy btw, and was surprised at both the student complaint and what the prof did; interestingly, a secondary supervisor had suggested last spring that the key number was "two", and the students complaining to the professor was likely a result of 2 very young people talking together one day after class or sometime and egging each other on until it escalated to a complaint.)


Anyhow, I can completely agree with that...  Both with teachers and students, money is mattering more and more.

I mean, honestly, 2 rich kids bitch to a rich prof who sides with them?


Gag me, I just want to vomit.


Anyhow, they just built a new luxury dorm, and not only is it that every time I see it I think "they built that off my back," but also that they have street-level shops in it and one custom bikeshop sells $400 messenger bags, some undergrad said on Facebook.

Disgusting.


I'm so glad I'm getting the f*ck out of higher ed.


It's just more and more like a service industry catering to the wealth, and more and more it's making me think, "What the f*ck, are we back in the f*cking eighteenth century where I'm a tutor dependent on an aristocratic family?".

My new landlord on my first day:

My (Polish-American) landlord was cleaning the already very clean house when I came over with the first load of my stuff, and I had to tell him that the apartment was already clean well beyond my expectations, so to save himself some work and just stop.

"I'll be okay if you're okay," he was like.

He also told me he doesn't like to do work in an apartment unless a person is there, so some time in the next month or so I should give him a day's notice for a Saturday or a Sunday when he can come over and fix the bathtub grout.

He then led me into the bathtub and showed me two small places on the grout where it had gotten mildew-y.

"You can't get that out," he was like, "so you have to replace it all."

He also showed me how I should just put the rent check in an envelope and slide it behind a light fixture in back external-but-enclosed staircase, and that's where he picks it up.

"You never have to see me if you don't want to," he deadpanned.

New neighbors:

This old vaguely brown looking man walks a small dog, and when we talk, his name is [a hispanic name] and he's taking care of his daughter who lives in Miami's dogs.

Later, I meet an older woman out in the immaculately cut small yard of the house, and she introduces herself with a hispanic name, Rosy for short, though she says my landlord calls her "nosy Rosy" because she likes to know everything that goes on.

She also says she'd be happy to watch my packages for me like she did for the woman who formerly lived in my apartment because sometimes there's strange people walking up and down the block looking close at every house, and also to be good to my landlord, because if I'm good to the apartment he'll be good to me, but if I'm not, he'll keep all of the rent deposit.

She also said she was glad that I'm not a black tenant, since the last black tenant they had there was always people over, and they parked motorcycles outside.

Final moving indignity.

The day that I get up to move, I'm going around the apartment getting the very final stuff ready, and I start feeling an itching on my lower back.

I scratch and I scratch, so I go to look in the mirror, and right above my butt crack is a bedbug bite.

Later that evening, they start itching again, and I go to look in the mirror again and notice that it's actually three really close together (the bugs shift feeding places as you move while you sleep, that's why the bites are so close together).

Interestingly, the morning of the move as I was going outside to run a pre-move errand, I met a new guy who was living downstairs as a subletter - and when I asked him if he had noticed anything, he said lately he had been waking up itching in the morning.

I think he has the bedroom directly below mine, so it must be that the bugs are in the walls!

He also must be one of the people who feels bites, but not severely like me.

Great opening class question...

...to students, by the instructor I work with:

"What do you collect, and why?".

It brought out the quirkiest answers (dead insects, scarves, postcards, trips to national parks), and you could see some entering students really bond.

A few were into non-digital music, one because she fears what'd happen to her collection of songs if her iPod or whatever had a glitch, another b/c she had learned about the music industry and wanted to support the artists she likes, which you really can't do through streaming services, which are exploitative and benefit the big recording companies that have a stake in them.

The instructor I work with, who's from Singapore, said in one class that for a while she had a collection of letters from ex-boyfriends, but it weighed her down too much and so she got rid of them.

"TMI!", she joked with the class, and in the second class she didn't tell that anecdote.

Now, she collects mid-century furniture, which she thinks ties in to her fascination with the era of decolonization that birthed Singapore.

She is super cool, and I'm excited to work with her...

After the first class, we had a break for lunch, and then we had to be back in an hour-and-a-half for the second class.

"Rinse and repeat," she was like, saying farewell after the first class.

A secondhand tale of suicide.

The other weekend when I was out by the lake I bumped into a friend who I did my masters with, and later that night we ended up going out for a drink together at the (black) neighborhood bar.,

Somehow we got on the subject of autoerotic asphyxiation, and she told me a story that a friend of hers told her years ago:

Some guy that that guy knew grew up in an uber-conservative Catholic family in the Midwest, and he committed suicide.

Because they were embarrassed that he'd go to hell, that guy's family cooked up a story that he died from autoerotic asphyxiation, since although that was shameful, that way the suicide was accidental and not intentional, and so none of their friends or family would think that their kid went to hell.