Professor Margarine’s Psychic Attack

Maude here.

Ohhhhh she’s up to no good again! That loopy old community college instructor, Professor Margarine, gave us another feast of learnin’ today…

For the first 3 episodes, see post 1, post 2, and post 3.

We students stumbled into class at 9:30am, ready for another round of batshit crazy and we were not disappointed. As promised in our last meeting (much to the dismay of all of the students), Professor Marge served up an entire class time of tarot readings, rune stones, and other esoteric forms of psychic paraphernalia. The cultural significance, as this was a Cultural Anthropology class, was half-assedly explained last week… but I think this was an attempt to avoid teaching from the textbook yet again. (To be clear: we’re now significantly passed the chapter on Religion and Culture, so this was an awkward transition back a chapter or two… and the reading assignment in the past had very little to do with New Age practices anyway.)

The first thing I noticed was that our squat little Marge was adorned in a headscarf. I spent a moment musing about what could be under it… was it a lady bald spot? A bad hair day? An homage to Professor Quirrell in the form of a maniacal second face that takes over her entire body and tries to dominate the known world?

Who fucking knows. I’m going with a half-assed “days of yore psychic” costume. Today, our old broad was in full-kook and on a mission to show us that she was, in fact, an intuitive AND a PhD. I guess stranger things have happened in the history of community college instructors…

And here she is, in all of her glory. (Face blurred to spare her some dignity.)

Some of my favorite quotes from today:

1. “I sold something in a bottle labeled ‘Whale Regurgitation’ for around $3,000. That’s just whale barf. Are you stupid?” (No, lady… you’re just a con artist who could probably bumble her way into selling a blind man contact lenses.)

2. “When I was a fortune teller, I put this little crystal ball on the table… mostly just to impress people.” (What ELSE would you have as a fortune teller??)

3. “Someone asked me to do ‘screeing’ for them. Does anybody really do screeing?” (Note: She was trying to say “SCRYING.” Of course, a real fortune teller would probably know that. Then again, a real fortune teller would be able to see that her entire classroom was taking a mental dump with every word she was saying.)

4. “I didn’t flush every time I used the psychic storefront’s toilet. People were pretty mad.” (This may be construed as eco-friendly, but I digress.)

5. “If it’s dark, you can’t see. If it’s light, you can.” (This was in reference to how to make your psychic reading room more “authentic.” You can see in the light?! No shit, Sherlock.This was the most “deep” thing her farty, dilapidated head could come up with.)

We literally spent an hour and a half passing around various ‘Crystal Shoppe’ items like sticks of unlit incense, samples of essential oils, and gagging on the smell of decaying ‘mysticism’ books. Now, I’m not unfamiliar with any of this junk. I used to frequent many a peaceful New Agey store, but this level of bullshit was nauseating. As we were passing around her dusty old spiritual items, she’s telling us how she manipulated a number of people when she used to read tarot. I’ve personally known some wonderful people who make a living trying to HELP people with tarot and psychic readings, and there are so many people who are into New Age fluff that genuinely want to help people… but Marge must want us all to hate her. She was so cynical and so profoundly irresponsible when explaining alchemy and esoteric spirituality, it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth… and I wasn’t alone.

Whispers ensued throughout the class as the “lecture” went on. Many people thought the whole thing was pretty hokey, and it was. Another group of students were flabbergasted that she would actively try to harm people by preying on their spiritual and personal growth beliefs.

I fell into both camps. I do not understand people who get high off of the smell of their own butts… and Marge has become infamous for that. She thinks she’s so sly with her mystical head wrap and her oh-so-trendy candy skull tee-shirt… but it doesn’t take a genius to see that this woman is a total sociopath. I repeat: a total sociopath. She admitted several times that she had swindled people into making decisions that would benefit her wallet over others’ wellbeing when she was a tarot reader. She also went on to call all of her “alchemy” the “real deal” and that tarot was a way to pay the bills.

The word disingenuous comes to mind, but that doesn’t do this woman justice. Marge is one of those people who has found a way to flub her way through life and has caught a few breaks here and there, and somehow has found herself in a teaching position. These sorts of people need to be weeded out of the educational system, period. While these stories about Professor Margarine may be somewhat funny, this sort of person has found a way to weasel her way into higher education. Students CAN and SHOULD put these foul frauds in their place and call them out on their sheer lack of teaching… I have been collecting all of these moments to present to her employers upon my semester’s end.

All I can say is…