GRAD SCHOOL PISS OFF

My grad school and I have been in a pissing match since last fall.  I finally decide that potty training them is taking longer than I anticipate, so I push them along a teeny bit.  You see, they continue to hold my major hostage, offering then pulling courses after already getting money out of those in the English Master's program.  This morning, after receiving notification that yet another semester is swirling down the shitter, I've had enough.  

 Here's a copy of the email I am about to send at 5:45 a.m.

Yo, Muddahfuckahs:

Honest to frickin' God, are you fucking shitting me right now?  You're cancelling another course?  What the fuck, people.  Now you have NO writing courses for the spring.  I already paid money for the course, I already ordered and paid for the books, and you people SUCK.  Do you hear me?  YOU SUCK.

This is the second goddamn time I've had to jump ship from your cut-rate, piece of shit university.  You people couldn't run a program if your jobs depended on it.  Your administrative skills are about as advanced as the Mayans.  Not since sitting through a session of Congress have I seen so many stupid fucking inept idiots gathered in one spot.  Did I mention that you all SUCK?

The courses you offer are not only useless, but I've taken better classes at the undergrad level, and I'm talking when I got my Associates at community college.  You have professors whose first class announcement is "I'm supposed to be going on Sabbatical, so I don't even want to be here this semester … good luck with that," to professors who cancel their classes because their editor might call with some big book deal and god forbid they miss the fucking phone call to go mouth off on Oprah.  Someone tell Professor Asswipe that Oprah got herself cancelled, so he should get his fat, lazy ass back in the seminar room.

And don't tell me to take a fucking lit course.  The last lit course was supposed to be all about Hawthorne and Cooper and Irving; instead it was about feminist lit.  Feminist lit!  Really?  Do you friggin' people NOT understand that feminist lit died out in the early 1990's?  Where the hell have you people been -- looking at your own prostates from the inside?  Feminist lit is garbage.  It's crap.  It's a fallacy.  It's chick-lit gone bad.  It's not even angry militant lit; it's bargain basement writing wearing a fake Prada label.

You damn well better come up with some kind of fucking alternative because I WILL get my degree if it tortures us all.  I will sit in your offices and write my capstone project as fucking graffiti across your goddamn walls.  I will scratch my thesis in the bricks in front of the student center, up the cement walkway, and straight into the registrar's office if I have to. 

Cancelling courses won't make me go away, you stupid fucks; it will just make me angry.  And you do NOT want to see me pissed off.  See this?  This is my happy face.  My fucking HAPPY FACE.  So do NOT cancel my seminar.  Do NOT do it, or so help me god I will write my final paper, all thousand fucking pages of it, in blood and seal it with hot wax and somebody's eyeball. 

Do you people hear me?  ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!  Sonofabitch already!  SONOFABITCH!

Then I think, "Maybe this isn't the best approach."  I re-read my email and decide to tone it down a notch or two or sixty.  I realize that the object of winning a pissing match is to do so without getting any of the opponent's nor my own piss actually on me.  If anyone can piss, it's me.  I've been pissing and moaning practically since birth. Besides, I'm an English writing major, crafty in the fine art of verbose persuasion; Tsarina of the Written Evisceration; Expert in Verbal Disembowelment (which, by the way, is leaps and bounds better than pissing on a bonfire). 

 Here is my revised email, the one I send at 6:00 a.m.

Dear Professors Y------ and P------:

I am extremely frustrated over the possibility of the seminar course for the spring being cancelled.

I came back to Blahbutty-Blah-Blah University to complete the Master's degree I started and abandoned in '97 because I was road-blocked by the course offerings.  Now I am halfway through my degree, MA in English with a concentration in Composition, and am finding it increasingly difficult to continue.  It's impossible to get a degree in a major you offer if the courses are not going to be available.  First of all, there are no other writing courses offered that I can take.  Secondly, I am growing tired of being told to "just take a literature course."  If I wanted a literature major, I'd be on that track.

I understand that I can transfer to another college (yet again) and complete my Masters (yet again) somewhere else.  I hold an MEd from a competing institution.  I could get into an MFA program somewhere, but the thing is, I bought a bill of goods being offered by Blahbutty-Blah-Blah University.  I invested in Blahbutty-Blah-Blah University, and I expected the university to do the same for me.

Quite frankly, I don't care if the course has three students or thirty.  This is a course I need to complete the major your institution offers.  I am anxious to complete my degree, and I'm willing to do the work in my major.  If/when the course gets cancelled, I will need an independent study or some other option to fill its place as I have already made a payment on the payment plan offered by Blahbutty-Blah-Blah University   I have already lost $600 out of pocket for a course that I was told to take when another writing course was cancelled.  It turned out to be a feminist lit class - absolutely NOT a fair trade for an independent-minded writer - and, after attending for one hour, that's the amount Blahbutty-Blah-Blah University took from me.

I have hundreds of pages of a memoir started, and over one hundred pages of a young adult fiction novel started.  I don't want to have to turn back nor turn away now.  Isn't there something, anything at all, that can be done to not only salvage this seminar course but this major?

Sorry to be long-winded and petulant, but I'm starting to lose sight of my degree all over again, and it is extremely (yes, I AM using an adverb) disheartening.

My best,

Heliand

I get three separate responses during the day, all before noon.  The first is to thank me for my thoughtful email, and they'll see what can be done.  The second is to tell me my email has been forwarded to The Powers That Be at the grad school.  The third is to inform me that although several other classes (all literature ones) have been cancelled, my seminar writing class will be running.

I'm sure this isn't the end of the Great Grad School Pissing Match, but this round appears to be a win for me.  Good thing I toned down my initial email; damn good thing.   

For now, I have the Badder Bladder, and, for a change, it feels pretty damn good … Muddahfuckahs.