My Name Is Gregor Samsa, and This Time I Woke Up as a Grad Student at Cal State San Bernardino

You’ve probably heard about the first time this happened to me. You know: guy goes to sleep, wakes up as a giant bug, freaks out his family, worries about losing his job, and his dad throws an apple at him. It’s a tale as old as time. And, I’m not going to lie, it was a huge pain in the ass. Life as a bug was rough. Eating rotten food and scurrying around all day isn’t as fun as it sounds. But the worst part was all the essays college students were forced to write about how what happened to me was supposed to represent man’s inhumanity to man or whatever. Give me a fucking break.

What you probably don’t know is that life gradually got better for me. Yes, I was still a disgusting bug, but I was able to make the best of things. I built up a pretty big following on TikTok, and before long, my sponsored content and merch sales were more than enough to cover my family’s monthly expenses. Even my father admitted that I had made something of myself. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but for the first time in a long time, I felt like I’d found my place in the world, even if it took a bizarre metamorphosis to bring it about.

And then it happened again. I went to bed on my cozy bug’s nest of straw and wood shavings, and I woke up on a thirdhand Ikea futon being propped up with a copy of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. I was human again, but just barely. I stumbled out of my bedroom to discover that I shared this tiny, squalid apartment with a person named Thad who claimed to be a part-time barista and a full-time experimental sound artist. Thad offered me a sip from his can of Red Bull and played some of his latest sound art for me. I know I have described many of the indignities I have experienced in life, but listening to Thad’s “art” was so traumatic that language alone cannot capture the sense of dread and horror that I felt. Once the horrendous sounds abated, I felt the need to escape from this apartment and never return. Fortunately, Thad told me that I was expected at work.

Apparently, I worked as a teaching assistant somewhere called “Cal State San Bernardino,” where I was a graduate student. In my old life, in Prague, scholars were among the most respected people in the city. I was delighted to learn about my new fate; it almost made up for being exposed to Thad’s “schizo-rhizomatic soundscape.” Naturally, I expected a private limousine with a driver to pull up in front of my apartment building, as was the case with the other doctors and professors that I knew back home. At this point, Thad told me that I would need to take the bus. He showed me the bus pass in my wallet, along with several credit cards that he told me were all maxed out. I felt a pit of dread opening in my stomach, the same feeling I had as a bug when I thought somebody might step on me. The bus pulled up, and I got on board.

When I arrived at the campus, I was told I would be brought to my office, but this turned out to be just the latest of the lies I have been subjected to. When I pictured a scholar’s office, I imagined a grand den, lined with mahogany bookshelves, and filled with ancient tomes and the latest scientific equipment, not unlike Dr. Freud’s office at Berggasse 19 in Vienna (I was sent there after the whole “bug thing” happened). What I was shown was an abandoned janitor’s closet that had most likely been used as a nest/bathroom/breeding den by a colony of feral cats. There was no window, a single desk, a defunct vending machine, and twenty other grad students who “shared” this space with me. These were the saddest looking people I had ever seen; compared to them, even Thad looked like Archduke Franz Ferdinand or Czar Nicholas.

One of them handed me a stack of paper almost a meter high. They told me that these were my share of the freshman comp essays and that I needed to finish grading them by five o’clock. They also said that, even though the papers had students’ names on them, almost all of them were actually written by someone called “A.I.” I asked why this A.I. was writing all of the students’ papers for them, but nobody seemed to know. When I asked them why we allowed this to happen, one of the grad students said we were supposed to “critically embrace generative A.I. technology.” When I asked what that meant, nobody had an answer. I sat down to look at the essays.

The ones written by this A.I. person were easy to spot: bland, boring, and full of clichés. The writing was fine, but lifeless, as if it had been created by some kind of automaton like the Golem of Prague (good buddy of mine and a great guy by the way!). One of the TAs told me it was school policy to just give those papers a B- and forget about it, which was easy enough to do. The papers actually written by students were usually more interesting, but also filled with errors. I gave all of them a B-, too, except for one, which I gave an A+. That paper was about me.

This student seemed to have stumbled across that famous short story about my life as a bug. I’d read this story before, of course, but now that I was a grad student instead of a disgusting cockroach, it resonated in a different way for me. The student’s description of my strange transformation, my disgusting bug’s body, my hideous diet, and my isolation from my family and friends made me feel extremely nostalgic for that magical time in my life. Nobody named Thad made me listen to terrifying experimental music. Nobody forced me to grade essays in an overcrowded, underground prison cell. I found myself fantasizing about returning to my old life, determined to make the most of it this time. I wandered out of my office, caught the bus home, and—after brushing aside Thad’s collection of “rare Japanese funk LPs”—I fell asleep on my futon. I disappeared into a dreamless night.

Again, I awoke transformed. Gone was my futon, gone was Thad’s rare vinyl, gone was Thad himself (I already liked this new life better). This time, my apartment was pretty sweet. For starters, it was less of an apartment and more of a gigantic mansion in the California mountains with a seven-car garage and an infinity pool. I noticed a small bell on my bedside table. Curious, I picked it up and rang it. Instantly, a team of servants—some of whom I recognized from the TA office—came rushing in carrying flowers, breakfast, and a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet called “Emergency Financial Contingency Plan—Faculty Cuts.” Glancing at the spreadsheet while my underlings stared at me in rapt silence, it suddenly hit me: I was the University President.

Forget the whole bug thing, this new life ruled. All I had to do was hand out honorary doctorates to brain-dead tech bros, solicit donations from weapons manufacturers and fossil fuel powerhouses, and rubber-stamp plans to raze the library and begin construction on an on-campus lazy river. And if anybody ever questioned any of my decisions, I could fire them! It was a perfect existence. I just had to make sure I never fell asleep. If my life as a traveling salesman got me turned into a bug, this new life was going to get me something much, much worse.

This is an exclusive excerpt from long-time Tendency contributor Ross Bullen’s new comedy book, How to Succeed in Academia, available now from Humorist Books.