University Prostitute

It happens twice a year. I go through a 'heat' phase in February and July of every bloody 365-6 days and it has been like this for 4 years. In these months my anxiety climbs the mercury and an inexplicable affectivity clouds my senses. I need to teach. I need to be in the university. I need to be filled by my students. And more importantly, my bank account needs to be satiated.

I am a university prostitute. I travel from one institution to another calling like a bitch in heat, curling and moaning at academic's feet, begging for a class to teach. I will lick their gangrene toes, I will kiss their ass till it turns blue, and I will smile and laugh at their stupid jokes. I will do anything it takes to teach because universities are too poor to employ their PhD students in full-time work.

I can't help this condition. There are no men in limousines who would climb the bricks of my walls with a dozen roses and save me. There are no knights in shining armour. Look closer and the dull sheen of sheep dung is plastered on his breast. This is not a dog-eat-dog world. We've climbed the evolutionary escalator. It's a I'll-shit-on-you-if-you-don't-shit-on-me world. We are the only animals left with the imagination to innovatively insult and hurt. I always knew Darwin was a twat.

I am a university prostitute with my 2-year-old, made-in-China G-Strings showing discontentedly over torn jeans. People say it's unseemly, and was definitely never in fashion. But it gets the attention I need. Beggars can't choose, but prostitutes can - your house or mine?

University prostitutes are a subculture all of their own. There is an echelon of solidarity in prostitution even if you see us standing alone in the streets, waving our resumes in desperation. University prostitutes construct a secret demesne that is carved from the secured tenureship of academics. We lurk in the corners of the university; crouching like coolies, smoking our cigarettes and drinking cold coffee. We have a shared goal - to siphon as many classes as possible from 70-year-old academics who don't know the meaning of retirement. Our agendas are quite simple: wait for the bastard to die and take over the position. Don't be upset by this cruelty. Darwin The Twat called it survival of the fittest. See how theories bite your ass when you least expect it to?

We take our disempowered and transgressive position very seriously. Our identities as university prostitutes demand a 'twilight' phenomenon that is meant to scare full-time academics out of a job, or, to give us more classes to teach. Anna Clark made an interesting suggestion that prostitutes are 'twilight' creatures because these disenfranchised dissidents "can be seen as the shadow side of power, produced by structures of domination yet unacknowledged - an open secret" (2005, 146). Ah - yes. We are that open secret that full-timers don't like to think about. We are the monster children that circle the air like vultures, waiting - always waiting - for the right moment to strike. We can smell a corpse a mile away. But that is what universities have made us into. We do not choose our condition; rather, the conditions chose us.

Students are always over-flowing into every university. People are starving for knowledge in our Age of Information and everyone demands an education. Lecturers complain about their full-time load, coffee machines are now mandatory in each department, and cigarette buds are no longer containable in those massive black bins. Everyone is dissatisfied with the "all work no play" motto and still the universities refuse to pay. Their motto never changed: "We're poor - fuck-off." And they ask why we twilight eidolons haunt their universities with an irrepressible need to satiate our desires.

The facts are simple. We're desperately poor with a fucking A-Class PhD. Now that's a joke to tell your grandchildren. A statistician would tell you that the probability of a greenhorn PhD getting a full-time job is equivalent to a garbage collector selling garbage. You might know your shit but you ain't getting paid for it.

So this is my life dear friends. 4 years of practice have made me a professional groveller and a professional ass-kisser. Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm the best bitch in my field. I have a 95% satisfaction rate in all the work I do. But who cares? Read the university motto again.

Anyway, this talk ain't gettin me noth'in. You want me or what?