An acquaintance of mine recently posted this on her wall:

“MFA thesis defended!”

These are the comments that followed:

***************

Congratulations!

Way to go, Sloan!!

You did it, you’re the best!!xoxo

Awesome. Just awesome.

It must feel great to accomplish something so useful!

Congratudonlences!

That’s great, hopefully the debt won’t be too crippling!

You’re going to be a poet, I hope! A nation really can’t have too many of them!

That’s eight years spent in academia that you can be damn proud of!

So. Fucking. Brave.

Very sorry to hear this. WHAT NOW???? At least your mother died believing that you’d never finish that degree!

Thank God somebody is finally going to give some attention to Gender Dichotomies in the Kitchen: Feminine and Masculine Qualities of Spaces and Artifacts as exhibited in Queer literature of the 1990’s! It’s been a long time coming! You rawk, Sloan!

Idiot.

Hopefully after all those years you committed to that institution, you have a good relationship with them and they might offer you a job as a diversity officer or something!

Sloan, you have just taken your Blog to the next level!

So, so, so sorry to hear this. Big hugz!!

My ex works at the Starbucks on College and University, and I am sure he can get you a job there while you write your novel. Private message me.

Fantastic news! You must be super proud! See you at the Slam Poetry workshop on Sunday!

First of all, before I write my message, I want to thank Mother Earth for all the resources that she allows us to use, and honour all First Nation, Métis and Inuit people whose land we settlers now stand upon. We ask your forgiveness. YOU ARE THE BEST, SLOAN, YOU MUST BE SO PROUD!!

Have you told your psychiatrist yet?

I have a pet peeve to air out. I’m always irked when people complain about something not being “proper English.” I maintain that there’s really no such thing; that English is only ever “proper” in a particular context, be it formal, academic, conversational, etc. What’s your proper take?

Tony Martins

Dear Mr. Martins:

I’m glad that you asked this particular question. The absolute worst thing that anybody could ever do to their life is get a master’s degree in English literature. (King Joffrey from “Game of Thrones” has a master’s in literature.)

This flimsy credential will give the holder an inappropriate amount of external confidence and entitlement but actually fill them with a crippling sense of insufficiency and self-loathing because they failed to advance any further in the world of academia. These “masters” think they’re better and more gifted than their less-certified peers but will have realized, deep, deep down in the burning pit of their anger hole that in failing to summit Mt. PhD they’re really not exceptional, just pitifully bound to the notion of external validation. Inevitably, they will take refuge in small, cruel pedantry, rattling on about things like “proper English” in the midst of the most benign, innocuous social encounters. They’re all a bunch of fuckers. There’s no such thing as proper English. We practically communicate through hieroglyphs now, okay? Get over it, fuckers. Whenever somebody says that you’re not using “proper English,” what that person is actually telling you is “I hate my life.”

Please send all letters for Bitter Writer to mm@michaelmurray.ca or post in the comments section of this page.

Encumbered by a stern resting face, she’s locked like a laser into the world of her iPhone. Forced and slightly unnatural, she makes a point of never glancing around but lives inside her self-constructed bubble bringing small, impulsive miseries upon employees through calls or texts. After about 15 minutes her companion, hurried and apologetic for being late, arrives. The stern-faced woman is passive-aggressive, telling the new arrival that she had no choice but to go ahead and order, and then making unnecessary and pointed noises of completion with her cutlery. She then launches straight into business, a vampire sucking information from her guilty and compliant victim.

There are two waitresses serving the half dozen or so tables and both of them are lovely. One is tall and thin with a trace of brittleness to her, as if she hasn’t quite found her place in the world and might be looking for some time yet. She wears over-sized, bold glasses meant to add some complexity to the generic beauty queen image she projects—this, something she worries about, you can tell.

The other one is young and dewy, striding optimistically forward. She’s completely comfortable with who she is, and being good-natured and cheerful is not a mask she puts on when she goes to work—she wants to meet the world exactly where it stands.

An older woman, over-dressed for the weather, has the long, grey hair of a sociologist. She’s proud of it and considers it a political statement, pulling it into two practical pigtails that she fastens, one with a red band, and one with blue. She’s very particular, almost stubborn in her manner, and when she stands up to dust the crumbs off her placemat and onto the ground, it’s as if she’s beating a carpet out on a clothesline. Efficient, economical and unsentimental, she wants us to see her self-reliance, how she’s always been happy to live alone in this world. A train then trundles by, and everything shakes. Somehow, the patio then seems to dislocate and separate from time for a moment, and the world becomes a little richer, the passing aroma of electricity and oil drifting through us like history.