I have to write around four of them a week and I hate it so much that I no longer have the energy to be hateful. I have decided to give up pretending most of their work is academic and just shoot the shit in my peer reviews.

“ Is it weird that this story reminded me of White Fang? I just read it recently. White Fang is all about how this wolf wants to be a dog, to be beholden to man, and so it sort of talks about destiny and placement in the world and man’s dominion in the world, while also discussing one’s nature. The defining feature in it is attribution, i.e. that White Fang’s motivations are not something that Jack London could possibly actually know, but the themes of the story emerge from the application and execution of motivation on the wolf. So your story reminds me of that, because the themes that emerge from it are from the application of motivation/emotion/feelings of destiny on your penguin.

It also reminds me of that one Friends episode, do you know the one? Where Phoebe and Joey are shopping for a Christmas tree and Phoebe wants to buy the shitty dead-looking one because she wants to give it an opportunity to fulfill its “tree destiny.” I feel like your penguin has a penguin destiny it wants to fulfill and you might want to exploit that to extract meaning from a subject that can easily become schmaltzy. Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree at the end of Charlie Brown Christmas, schmaltzy, but tears. “

Sometimes I would do this kind of random association shit with my students and they would just be all “Teacher… what?” which is the right response to me usually because I just talk all the time. This chick wrote this ten page long story about a stuffed penguin that wants a forever home. What does she want me to say?