A Blowing Off Steam Thread

~ Clarissa

Reader Anon made the following timely suggestion:

I don’t have anything to promote, but I do have a request. A while back you had a thread where everyone could vent with whatever (often creative) profanity they wanted. It was extremely cathartic to write and a good deal of fun to read, and I could use a good place to rant and some curse-laden humor… So if you’re having a day when you need to vent, I would appreciate it if you reprised that sort of thread! Thanks a bunch!

I don’t know about you, but the end of the semester and the end of the calendar year are definitely getting to me. Normally, when things were getting overwhelming at work, I used to. . .

Papa, don’t read what comes next. Just step away from the computer because this will not make you happy.

. . . swear in Russian in my office. I would give myself about five minutes of good, inventive Russian swearing every couple of hours, and that was good. But now that we have resuscitated our Russian program, I’m afraid the Russian instructor will hear me and feel traumatized. And I don’t speak any language that is not spoken at our department. So this way of blowing off steam is gone.

This is why I think we should do what Anon suggests and start a Blowing Off Steam thread.

Feel free to rant, rave, and curse as much as you wish in any language whatsoever. Feel free to do it anonymously. Just one rule: don’t insult other people in the thread. Curse me instead.

I will make this thread sticky for a while, so scroll down for new posts.

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Published by Clarissa

25 thoughts on “A Blowing Off Steam Thread”

  1. Thank you, Clarissa!
    AUGH fuck Foucault, fuck my (lack of a) love life, and most of all, fuck the really bad stream of grumpy autistic days I’ve been having. I do not need this in my life right now. Please, every source of stress in my life right now: Go fuck yourself with a chainsaw.

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    1. OK, I don’t know how you do it, but fuck Foucault is so brilliant that I’m laughing now even though I’m completely exhausted. I think this should become common usage because it sounds so good. 🙂

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      1. If it makes you feel even better, I titled my final essay “What the Foucault do we know about Colonialism?” 🙂

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  3. Special relativity needs to die now. There is absolutely no fricking reason why these stupid formulas aren’t working. x equals fricking x’/y. Now it’s 4:46 in the morning and my stupid 24-question problem set isn’t done because I didn’t have time during the rest of the week because of calculus. I’m running on three hours of sleep and an hour’s nap, and I won’t get a chance to nap tomorrow because I’ve got flipping chemistry and the rest of this fricking physics set to do.

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  5. Fuck the fact that I have to abandoned TA contracts the next semester in order to have a good proposal!

    Fuck the fact that my reasearch is behind my previous schedule because I love too much teaching to teach a course like the others!

    Hummm…maybe it’s not as shitty as it looks like… 🙂

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  6. (Thanks a bunch, Clarissa!)
    Screw you, job application season, with a pinecone. And not just one of those tiny, cute ones, one of those pig gnarly ass fuckers with pointy spines on each of the petals. Seriously? Why the fuck is it the norm for people to send out so many god damn applications?! Can’t you just fucking specify what you want in your advertisement, and then we can all apply to things that we actually have better than an ice cube’s chance in hell of getting? But nooo…. we like to pretend science is a god damn meritocracy, and you want all of your applications to be open to all the promising young people… Bull shit. Who gets the big fucking prizes? People at fancy fucking institutions who’s advisors have big swinging dicks. Sure, some of us talented little people percolate up into a short list every now and then, and we tell ourselves “Well at that stage every proposal is so good, it’s really just random who gets the prize and who doesn’t.” And yet, somehow, it’s people from the same institutions who get the prize every god damn year. And who gets the little positions? Students of a friend of the person who is advertising. This is a seriously a waste of everyone’s god damn time, and I would like to get back to, gee I don’t know, ACTUALLY DOING RESEARCH.

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    1. People are so inventive with their swearing that I now feel envy. Screw you with a pinecone is the best.

      I feel your pain, my friend. Application season is the worst. The whole process is such a massive shoot crap that words can’t describe. All I can say is that I wish you the best of luck and screw them all with a bunch of hugr gnarly pine cones.

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      1. Anon summed up pretty much 75% of my frustration these days.

        One job I am applying for requires so many documents that I have already printed +300 pages. I am half-way done. And I kind of know that this job will be for a friend, or a friend of a friend.

        What a waste of time, paper, and energy.

        Fuck.

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  7. Indeed I did.
    More ranting:
    I can’t fucking stand the sight of you any longer, you pathetic, spoiled, stupid crybaby. I really don’t give a shit about your problems, find somebody else to whine towards, I have my own shit to deal with right now. As far as I am concerned, you can drop off of the face of the earth. You’re the cause of about 80% of the stress in my life right now, and I would consider it an absolute blessing if I never had to deal with you ever again.

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  9. I am surrounded by nasally uptalking manginas whose ostensible claim to being Creative is betrayed by the shallow kitsch-ification of every facet of their existence, on public display for insecure purposes of validation. Where are the grown-ups?!

    Thank you.

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  10. Thank the fucking universe! Time to complain!!

    Dear administration — it is cool to give out grants to people. It is not cool to tell people who are too busy to breathe that it’s required of the grant that they give a presentation on the research they did with that grant money a year later. It’s not that I can’t do it. It’s that I didn’t know I had to do it. So now I’m so overcommitted during break that I will have no time to tailor this presentation to non-Shakespeareans, and none of you dipshits will understand what I’m saying. You need to update your fucking grant application to make it clear that there are even more hoops to jump through for your meager-ass 750 fucking dollars. I reread everything concerning this grant today. Nowhere, ever, does it say that you have to give a presentation of your research to the faculty in January. Nowhere! It’s nowhere in writing ever. The administrator admitted this fact, and said “You’re still expected to do it.” Fuck.

    Dear everyone who asks for my opinion and then says shut up – Don’t ask me anymore, or I might say fuck you to your face.

    Dear all the grading I have to do — I’m about to give up and assign grades based on whether or not I like the student. It’s a good thing I have a modicum of integrity, or I’d totally do that. If I had any autonomy, I would not have assigned such bullshit assignments. But since I am team teaching, I have no choices and no agency. I hate team teaching. I hate you, assignments. Fuck you.

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    1. We ask our grant applicants to write a couple of sentences on the application about the research that came out of their previous funding but there is no presentation. This must be really onerous, so I feel your pain.

      “Dear everyone who asks for my opinion and then says shut up – Don’t ask me anymore, or I might say fuck you to your face.”

      – Yes. Yes. Fuck these losers.

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  11. The really onerous part is that we’re expected to do a PowerPoint of our paper, which is simply bullshit. I don’t have time to do another fucking PowerPoint, in addition to the fact that I was hoping to take a PowerPoint break, since I have to do some many PP presentations for humanities.

    Also, I did have to write a follow-up paper (2 pages) regarding what I did with the grant money and how my experience went. I think that’s more than enough of a ‘thank you’ for the money. Besides, it’s not like it’s 75,000 dollars. It’s only 750 dollars. It was a trip to Boston, not a trip to London. For fuck’s sake people, get real! I should not have to do anything else besides the stupid follow-up paper. And even that 2-page thing seems to be a little over the top. Christ.

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  12. Dear Administrator Clarissa,

    Despite reminders from my colleagues that I shouldn’t see ill-intent when incompetence is an adequate explanation, I can’t help but think that you are trying to destroy the university.

    * You’re spending millions year after year an outside marketing firm to improve enrollment. Last year, overall enrollment went down by about a 1%, but freshman enrollment went down by about 8%. This year, overall and freshman enrollment both went down by about 5%.

    * You lied to everyone by claiming that enrollment problems would turn around when this year’s junior and senior classes finish up. This year’s sophomore class is smaller than last year’s. This year’s freshman class is smaller than last year’s. It will take at least four years for this mess to work its way through the system.

    * You are cutting department funds and getting ready to eliminate entire degree programs to pay for your pet projects. You claim that programs are cut by some rational criteria, but your numbers don’t add up. As far as anyone can tell, your criteria are to fund the departments that you personally like and cut the ones you personally don’t like.

    * You lied about the extent of the layoffs on campus. I know more people who received layoff notices than the total you told the Faculty Senate would be laid off.

    * When you met with my unit, you tried to mislead us into thinking we were getting resources, but a simple question made it clear that we were not. Without throwing one of your legendary tantrums, you nevertheless made it clear that you don’t give a damn about us.

    * You treated a kind, hard-working, low-paid employee like garbage because he dared to tell you that one of your underlings was harassing student workers.

    * You fired nearly all the administrators in the two levels below you and put all the administrators on one-year contracts. You claimed that it was so you could can them if they were ineffective, but the stories of your tantrums make it clear that you will can anyone who reports to you who is not obedient and obsequious.

    How long will it take before the people above you wise up to your lies and realize that you’re the one who should be canned? The university was limping along before you arrived, but I don’t know if it will be able to recover from Hurricane Clarissa.

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    1. Dear Paranoid, this administrator sucks something fierce. We have a new Chancellor and we still don’t know what to expect. I just hope that we don’t have such horrible luck.

      “As far as anyone can tell, your criteria are to fund the departments that you personally like and cut the ones you personally don’t like.”

      – Sounds just like an administrator I know. 😦

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