Plug-in post to 'Four Walls'

I'm not sure whether to call this plagiarism or fan-art, but in response to le cousin who blogs of life and californiania - who just wrote about people "who are still attending or who have recently been relinquished of scholarly commitments" - I have decided to write a plug-in post... seeing as I was once relinquished and then dove right back in again...

(Incidentally, I don't think there are enough words that end in 'niania'... ;)

Professional Academics/PhD students:
We are of two sorts in most respects - either the kind who got out after graduation and lived life (with contract- or temp jobs, getting decently bashed to grow up a little) before coming back into fort academia; OR we are the kind who just never ever got out of here and seamlessly blended the student existence into a career of eternal thesis-writing. We either know exactly what our research is about, or we honestly haven't a clue (and we own up to both). We are supposed to do research in teams, but need to be egoists so that we actually spend the rest of our professional lives researching something that sparks our inspiration. We work overtime, all the time, at any time, but always manage to give the impression that we never actually work. We either have a well-groomed and meticulous appearance or look harmlessly nerdy.
We drink coffee incessantly (because it's the coffee, not the caffeine) unless we are tea facists. We talk about our respective fields of expertise, name-dropping philosophies of science theory. Half of us are VERY single and half of us are VERY settled/married. We either talk about what's on TV or we don't have one at all. We are loners who work in a solitary fashion in separate offices but make very jovial crowds at any dissertation (not only because there's always cake).

And we either love working with students for the promise they carry of becoming responsible and capable professionals; or we think they're like this.