Codependent Collegian

A Codependent Collegian Guest Editorial
By Professor Norman Tinsel, Indiana University

Tinsel: Those Pretty Blue Eyes? Full of Wrath!

Now that the spring semester is drawing to a close, most of us English types get pretty bogged down. And by bogged down, I mean we grade about 300 written assignments over a two-week span and drink ourselves to sleep while every whiny jag-off no-show miraculously reappears during our office hours to explain why they haven’t come to class in a month.

I can’t keep the secret any longer: I hate my motherfucking students, every single one of them, with their shitty grammar and text messaging and ability to eat three bags of Doritos in an hour and not gain a single pound.

And lest ye think this is merely the end-of-semester frustration talking, let me set the record straight: I unequivocally hate my students and hope they all die in a massive parking lot fire as they exit their final exams and burn like Dante’s gluttons in the inner circle of hell. Well, except for Ashley Mitchell—that girl wore low-cut tops even in February, and damn if I wouldn’t strap on some chaps and ride her like a sex pony.

But back to the issue at hand. It seems like my students are full of two things: questions and excuses. No one ever gives me a compliment on my Hamlet lectures or wants commend my recent book review. Instead, they just ask me inane bullshit that I’ve already answered in class, OR show up to explain why they’ve missed class, and then subsequently asked what they’ve missed.

Maybe I should retire. After all, I’ve been doing this for 27 years, and perhaps I’m at the end of my pedagogical rope. Or maybe the university should issue every prof a revolver with one bullet at the beginning of each term, with the understanding that he/she gets to shoot their worst student in the motherfucking head as an example to the rest of the rabble. I bet all these Brents and Ambers and Quentins and Britannys would straighten up real goddamn quick if that was the case.

Come to think of it, no they wouldn’t. God I hate these kids.

Labels: Indiana University

A Guest Editorial by Logan Williams,
Indiana University Class of 2009

It seems like only weeks since IU let out for the summer, and here we are, getting sickeningly close to the start of classes. True, we have ten days until we have to drag our depressed selves into an actual classroom, but the past two weeks have been filled with all sorts of quasi-academic crap that has bled into what remains of a dying summer season.

Death is stronger than we are, and we can’t prevent it. Therefore, whatever meanings exist must apply to the temporary period while we live, those remaining days before the start of the new semester.

Oh, we uncertain students are doomed to be seekers, always searching for a meaning to life but never quite finding that shred of purpose that keeps us from splattering our fucking brains all over the Quad with a rusty shotgun.

Yes, death looms ahead of us like a hangman’s scaffold being assembled outside the 12x12 window of a condemned man's prison cell, pouding nails an ever-present reminder of the precious few minutes we have before the noose of life breaks our fucking necks and we spend eternity floating around like one of those Bounce Fresh Linen Scent sheets that fell out of the laundry basket of a student on academic probation, blowing across the dorm parking lot with all of its softening and static-cling protection long since sucked out by the dryer that is life.

So you sit there listening to the horrific sounds of death around you - and I do mean horrific, so don't accuse me of an artifice like hyperbole - so you sit there with your drooling mouth hanging open because you can't believe what you're hearing from me, the sounds of TRUTH and LIFE hitting you smack square in the middle of your bourgeois face, and realize that there are now less than ten days left, brother, to make something of this impossibly short summer.

So what do you say? Would you rather hit Kilroy's Sports Bar or Scotty's Brewhouse tonight? Not that it really matters, given our inevitable deaths, but I hear Kilroy's is running a 25-cent Hot Wings special tonight, and I know the bartender, and she'll probably give us a couple of free beers, too, espcially if we leave her a phat-ass tip and stuff.

And there's nothing like that live pub trivia contest, matching wits against drunken imbeciles across the country, to make one forget about all that death shit.

Labels: existentialism, Indiana University, IU