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...

Preview: ~500 words