"So now that you're dead, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?"-Heathers

I've been laid off by NYU.

A month ago I received a phone call from Maureen, formerly referred to as Vichy here. (I no longer see any reason to protect these asshats from criticism so I will use their first names. ) She asked if I wanted to teach in the Fall. The phone reception wasn't very good, but assured her that I did want to teach, but before we could discuss how many sections and so forth the line cut off. The following week I received an emergency email from me asking me again, if I wanted to teach and if so what book and how many sections.

I wondered seriously about how to respond. Did I really want to go back? Shouldn't I look for something else?

But, of course, they were asking me to come back. It was a bit flattering to keep saying that I wanted to leave and be talked into staying. Not to mention long ago I liked teaching. I worked hard to get this job and maybe, I thought, maybe this year would be better.

So I agreed to come back and teach a reduced course load. I thought this way I could make some money and still be able to cover events like the NYCHFF.

Last night I got phone call from Maureen telling there was a "problem with the sections." What was the problem? They didn't have enough and so I wouldn't be teaching despite the email that I received only three weeks ago. Why won't I be teaching? Because the union won, and so they can't afford to pay me after five years of working for them with no health insurance. Five years of teaching. There are two teachers who have significantly less seniority than I do and have been more problematic. I mean, you tell me to teach this essay and I do, unlike Lionel who had to be told multiple times what the required essays were and still failed to do so for two years while ignoring another injunction and requiring his students to write essays on Paradis Lost. Or how about Sandra who can't seem to make it to any meeting on time by an hour or so? These are teachers who have only been with us for two years, but they decided to keep the summer staff all year round.

You have to love the loyalty.

I have to say on a certain level it's an honor to be laid off from a staff where I have a colleague with a Ph.D. who doesn't know enough not to give her diabetic mother maple syrup or another professor who told his class that "black women have to come to terms with having to settle for less when it comes to a man because most black men are either in jail or are drug dealers" or yet another teacher who demonstrates such unrelenting idiocy I wouldn't trust her to sit the right way on a toilet seat. And Ken doesn't even have a master's, and his previous teaching experience? He used to teach gym. That's what you're astronomically high tuition is going towards. Having a former gym teacher help you with your writing skills.

I, on the other hand, was a specialized tutor before I became a teacher. I have my Master of Fine Arts in English with a focus on Writing from the number seven ranked university in the country. I was pivotal in changing how HEOP/C-STEP teaches their summer Pre-Map course including doing massive research to help aquiant teachers with works that they would have to teach- works that all of them admitting they hadn't read since high school and didn't reread before teaching it. (The work in question? The Aeneid.)

But they can't afford that anymore. Yep it's just too expensive to keep around the one person who believed in actually reading the essays required of her class.

So welcome to rock fucking bottom. I'm 31 with no boyfriend, no assets, and no career. I don't even get the prestige factor anymore. I don't get to say "Oh no no being an Nyu prof. it's not THAt impressive." I'm unemployed. Unloveable and Unemployable.

You know, when Eric left five years ago, it was this job that really kept me alive. Seriously. No matter how depressed I got I still made it to class, I still taught, I still handed back papers. When my therapist suggested that perhaps I might consider going to an asylum the reason I didn't go was because of teaching. I had been trying to get a job in teaching for a year. I finally caught a break, and I wasn't going to give it up. Not even when every morning I was drinking vodka with gatorade just to get to class without throwing myself on the subway tracks. I was not going to lose this job after I had lost everything else I cared about.

And now here I am, with nothing really to care about anymore. Utter humiliated because a place that should be begging to keep me could care less. It's a good thing my father is dead because I can't imagine what he would say about this, but it wouldn't helpful. So I'm an utter failure at 31. Makes me wonder why I fought so hard to live this life.

Because despite what I seem like, I was an optimist once. No one is this angry unless they have been disillusioned. I came to NYC 12 years ago thinking I would show all those kids who made my life miserable, who made fun of me and said I could never get a boyfriend, never get be an actor. I was going to Be Something. I was going to have a good life. And it wasn't going to matter that I was disabled because people would love me despite that, and I was going to be important and do good things for people and most importantly be loved.

My junior year, I was emergency hospitalized for three days. Three. I was in a hospital not more than five blocks from my dorm and about ten from campus. Everyone knew where I was, they promised to visit. In three days not one person came to visit me, not one. My mother ran her hospital from the phoen at the foot of my bed. She got more calls than I did. The night before my released she left because of a board meeting and the next day I crutched home in the rain.

And that's when I began losing my faith in people. I didn't start off bitter and angry, I swear to you I didn't. I believed once that I could have a good life, that some man could love me.

And I believed in the Lochness Monster too.

And now? Now I just want to die. Because I can't take another disappointment. kiss Kiss is always telling me that I'm strong, but I'm not. A person can only take so mcuh. And I've wasted all my strength trying to deal with my health and other people and you know what? I deserve a fucking break. Just one. If I had a boyfriend to go home to I would feel different. Some one who when I came home would just hug me and make me feel like I was a somewhat desirable human being. That would be something. But at the moment, and I know it makes some of you nervous when I say these things, I just want to be dead. To have fought as hard as I have to live this life and have all that effort end up here, well honestly H.P. Lovecraft said it best when he said that in oblivion there are no unfulfilled wishes because there are no wishes to be fulfilled.

The only good news is that unlike my cousin, I'm not going to federal prison.

Well, yet.