This is the story of how a wedding, a soul patch, and one unfortunate acronym got me a job I never applied for.
It started at a wedding I didn’t even want to attend.
A favor for my parents, a sciatic nerve, a last-minute RSVP.
I’d been sent in their place to smile politely, drink badly, and sit through the ritualized optimism of two strangers promising forever.
We were seated at table number seven: me, an empty chair, Nicolas Coma—the Dean of the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences—his wife, and two couples whose names I hadn’t bothered to remember.
The Dean was swirling his wine with the air of a man quietly resigned to a life of cordial irrelevance.
The drinks were bad. The music, worse.
So the only thing left for me to do was be mean.
So I was.
I’d responded to every attempt at small talk with a grunt or a nod. Including his. Until he asked:
“What do you think of the Faculty of Journalism?”
I looked up. I answered only because it gave me the chance to be worse than mean:
“Not much,” I said.
He didn’t flinch—just tilted his head, mildly curious. The kind of curiosity worn by men who’ve learned that the most interesting conversations often begin with mild hostility.
“Why?” he asked.
“How many great journalists has your faculty actually produced?”
“In print or on TV?”
“Either. You can even count Peter O. Bath—though no one really knows what kind of journalism he does.”
He smiled, as if I’d just reminded him of something nostalgic.
“Not that many,” he admitted.
And that’s when I finally studied him. Properly, I mean.
To decide if he was worth a full sentence—or just another nod.
Nicolas Coma was a kind man. Mild, affable, entirely forgettable.
The kind of man who couldn’t stir passion in another human being—not even in himself.
Comparing him to Master Oogway would’ve flattered him far more than he deserved. He was more like a blend of Jeffrey Tambor, light sedatives, and ambient music you forget while it’s still playing. His wrinkles didn’t cut—they slouched. His face seemed designed not to offend. He looked like someone who had spent his entire life in second place.
Officially, he was an only child. Unofficially, the second—the firstborn died at birth. Always second row, second seat. Class B. Group Two. Deputy commander. Understudy. Substitute lecturer. The second husband of a very average woman. Driver of second-hand cars. And at the absolute peak of his career: Dean. Which is to say—someone who reports to a Rector. Men like him don’t dream of thrones. They politely pull a small stool a little closer to one. His skull was perfectly oval, framed by a tonsure that crept lower each passing year. As if to counter it, he’d grown a soul patch. Which might have worked—if he were Colin Farrell. But on him, it looked like the sad residue of a failed attempt at oral sex.
He chuckled.
“I suppose you have an explanation.”
“I do,” I said. “Three, actually.
But I’m still deciding whether you’re worth them.”
He leaned in with a smile.
“Indulge me.”
After a brief moment of theatrical reflection, I said:
“First of all, you’re running the only journalism faculty in the world whose acronym is physically unpronounceable. FJS… FC… FȘJ… Every time I try to say it, I feel my gums start to bleed. You’re the death of the vocal apparatus and a danger to that delicate organ we call the tongue.”
He felt the need to jump in, conciliatory:
“It’s all in the lips. Fe-Je-Se-Ce! You just have to hold them tight—Feee! Jeeee! And at the same time, prep a solid column of air in the trachea. Seee! Ceee! Compressed. FeeJeee! Which bursts out with the first two syllables. SeCe! Try it!”
He puckered his lips like a man inviting you into a breathing exercise, or a cult. And while I begrudged his success with the pronunciation, I had no intention of joining in.
“No need,” I said. “Because I’ve come up with a solution.
You could just rename the school Leonte Răutu.”
“You mean the head of the Communist Party’s Department of Propaganda and Culture?”
“And the longest-serving Dean of the very faculty you now lead.”
“Which brings me,” I added, “to the second point.”
“The faculty’s most famous graduate is still Mircea Dinescu—and he attended back when being a journalist was just a polite way of saying political officer in the press department.”
“Interesting! And the third point?”
“Well… statistically speaking, the Faculty of Agronomy—Department of Land Reclamation—probably produces more journalists than Fee! She!… Fee! Chee!… Leonte Răutu.”
Dean Coma pulled his chair closer to mine.
“And why is that?” he asked.
“Why?”
“Yes. Why do you think that is? What’s the problem with the faculty?”
At that moment, I couldn’t help but ask myself how I’d ended up giving a late-night tutoring session to the Dean of the Faculty of Journalism on the subject of his own professional failure.
Of course, I knew the answer.
My parents.
And their complete inability to decline invitations from people they barely knew.
And since my father had just suffered a sciatic flare-up, I’d been asked—no, sentenced—to represent the Jebeleanu family.
Which was especially frustrating, given that I’d had to cancel my appearance at another event, one where the drinks were drinkable, the music tolerable, and the women—delightfully unserious.
I looked at him again. Carefully.
And after a pause long enough to turn awkward, I said—calmly, but with a tone somewhere between exhaustion and accusation:
“Because your curriculum hasn’t changed since the 1960s.
History. Ethics. Labor law.
And what do you produce at graduation? Undercover operatives, spokespersons for the ruling party, specialists in manipulation, loyal guard dogs for corporate media holdings—and future members of the Broadcasting Council.
Which is to say—guard dogs again.
Just a different breed.”
Dean Coma gave an awkward smile. He shook his oval head a few times. The few hairs dangling from beneath his lower lip quivered indecisively. He looked past me as he spoke:
“I struck up a conversation because you looked bored.
I was hoping it would go nowhere, and we’d all have an excuse to leave early.”
“In that case,” I said, “you chose the wrong question.”
“Or maybe you chose the wrong answer.
Because now I feel compelled to defend my honor.”
A burst of laughter erupted next to me—dark, muddy, unmistakably brewed in hell.
“Honor? What honor?”
I turned 180 degrees to see who could possibly laugh like that.
It was Professor Chris Coma—PhD, full tenure, head of the Communication Department, and wife of the Dean himself.
“And if you are going to defend it,” she added, “I hope you use live ammunition.”
She shrugged and turned toward the rest of the table.
“What? I’m allowed to dream too, aren’t I?
We are at a wedding, after all—the place where illusions get dressed to the nines, invite their best friends, dance till dawn, and then settle in for a life of disappointment.”
If he was a good man, she wasn’t good by any metric.
She had a habit of failing entire classes just because she’d shown up two hours late to an exam and someone had dared to point it out.
As if he hadn’t heard a single word his wife had just said, Dean Coma scooted his chair even closer and asked:
“You graduated from Computer Science, if I’m not mistaken?”
Surprised by his insistence on continuing the conversation, I pointed a finger at his wife.
I wanted to ask if he hadn’t felt, as acutely as I had, the surge of malice that had just come from her direction.
But he continued before I could say anything:
“So what made you turn to journalism?”
“My future colleagues. I heard they were beautiful and emotionally unstable.
And the ones going into television—thanks to all that diction training—had developed an oral technique capable of coaxing out a ‘Mi-Mo-Ma! Mi-Mo-Ma!’ even from men paralyzed from the waist down.”
“You’re joking.”
“Never about sex.
That was just my way of pointing out that, whether you meant to or not, you were throwing me headfirst into your wife’s mouth—and I wouldn’t go in there… not even—”
“I was just trying to understand,” he interrupted, “where you think I’ve gone wrong.”
At that point, trying to explain to Dean Coma the sordid ways in which one might end up inside a woman’s mouth felt more honorable than breaking down where he had failed in his career.
But the man’s earnestness seemed immune to my cynicism—or to his wife’s malice.
“All of your lectures,” I said, “start with the same commandment:
‘Do not confuse the journalistic genres.’”
“So you have attended my course!” he beamed.
I had attended one of his lectures.
But I wasn’t about to admit it.
Instead, I continued:
“Do you really think a generation raised on memes, misinformation campaigns, and content that vanishes in 30 seconds can be inspired by warnings and ultimatums?
When you tell students ‘An informational article is different from a commentary,’ all they hear is that you’re out of touch with the spirit of the times—and have been culturally irrelevant for the past twenty years.”
Was it wise to waste my saliva on this kind of exchange?
Probably not.
But cruelty is its own reward.
So, in my mind, every neologism I uttered was actually a curse word. The kind you mutter with your teeth clenched. And I hoped Professor Chris Coma could hear the words behind my words:
Your hyper-correctness is exhausting and out of place, especially when the only real constant in this new generation is fluidity—stylistic, professional, and sexual. You want to reach them? Then teach them that restlessness is fertile.
And as my language grew more academic, the insults in my head got spicier.
They bubbled like pots on a stove.
“Baro, no matter what I say or what weak tricks you pull, the only thing coming out of this school is chicks with mics and dudes who think investigative journalism means scrolling on Facebook. You people have turned the press into a landfill of illiterates and recycled TikTok jokes. Your words have no blood. They’re broth. Thin broth. So thin, even a dying man wouldn’t drink it.”
But no.
Out loud, I responded with words like “intertextuality” and “discursive meaning production.”
“You should encourage them to make mistakes—maybe even stay confused for a while. The world is evolving, and so is the writing that reflects it.
While you were busy being academic, the world invented new forms of journalism: gonzo journalism, comic journalism, data journalism, YouTube amateurs, convergence journalism.
AI-assisted reporting. Interactive storytelling. ChatGPT and Sora.
In fact”—I went on, while my mind spun in a dizzying mix of Romanian and Romani obscenities—
“if the world’s brightest minds had studied at Leonte Răutu—and I’m thinking Einstein, Tesla—they’d have graduated unable to string two words together.”
“VR journalism, meme journalism, TikTok journalism, collaborative journalism with hackers, docu-influencers, and cats. Yes, cats. There’s even slow journalism now—for those who want to change the world to the rhythm of ambient jazz.
For all these reasons, the kind of journalism practiced at Leonte Răutu has nothing to do with real life—or with the lives of the students you’re meant to serve.”
“And you think you could do it better?”
It was his wife again.
I turned toward her with a kind of elegant hatred.
She was vibrating with barely restrained fury, transformed into a human coil of tension. Her short, straight hair stood almost perpendicular to her scalp, and her eyes had taken on a metallic sheen.
For a second, I considered answering.
But I knew from experience: a woman that angry becomes a kind of goddess of impotence. One whose curses can turn your private parts into radioactive wastelands.
So I opted for good manners and turned my back to her, saying nothing.
To the Dean, I said:
“Too late.
Looks like I’ve already ended up in your wife’s mouth.
And I think we can both agree—that’s entirely your fault.”
Once again, Dean Coma behaved as if he were completely immune—or permanently blind—to his wife’s outbursts and my revolting insinuations.
With serene composure, he said:
“I like Chris’s idea.
What do you say?
Would you be interested in teaching?”
I felt the need to clarify:
“Professor Coma’s question wasn’t serious.
It was a blend of irony, frustration, and a barely restrained desire to emasculate me.
Mine, however, is serious.”
There’s a Romanian word—lesser known, but perfect for moments like this:
pusilanimitate.
I know—it sounds made up. But it’s not. It’s as Romanian as it is real.
And I try to promote it every chance I get because, frankly, I think it defines us men rather well.
Pusilanimitate is that typically masculine paralysis we experience when faced with a woman having a full-scale nervous detonation.
In those moments, any man with a solid survival instinct knows that the safest response…
is to soil your underwear just a little.
That foul blend of fear and feces?
It’s the only scent that truly calms a woman like that.
“I’m sure Chris wasn’t being serious,” I added.
We both turned to look at her.
For a few long seconds, we just watched.
Eventually, Dean Coma gave a small, almost imperceptible nod of agreement.
Chris Coma, on the other hand, looked increasingly disfigured by hatred.
She opened her mouth to say something, but all that came out was a sharp, canine whimper.
Then she leaned in and said in a trembling falsetto:
“Jokes—the refuge of weak minds.”
Grinning, I replied:
“In my case, jokes are the intellectual equivalent of ‘play dead.’
Do they work?”
She ignored me.
Then turned to her husband:
“Darling, what you’re doing is cruel.
You don’t compliment a cripple on his deformities.
You can’t let this… this pusi—pusila—pusillan—ah—this spineless thing teach!
Can’t you see it?
His arrogance is metastasizing.
If we let him into our faculty, he’ll destroy us.”
Strangely, her rage had extinguished mine.
I turned to her and spoke with calm precision:
“Teaching journalism better than you isn’t difficult.
And I’ll explain why—starting with the arrogance you just diagnosed.
You see, arrogance and madness are etymological sisters.
And madness, at its core, is brutally honest.
So allow me to play the fool and bring the bad news:
Do you know how many of my newsroom colleagues studied journalism?
None.
And of the 20,000 journalists currently working in Romania,
only 5% have journalism degrees.
I won’t ask you to guess which group is better.
But I will say this:
The debate about the value of journalism schools is pointless.
Because the values I believe are fundamental to this profession
are not taught in institutions like yours.
The journalism I practice is built on four principles:
Revolt. Irreverence. The ability to craft a meaningful point of view.
And a vocation for the absurd.“
Andrei Jebeleanu 