Thursday, April 3, 1997
CULTURE:
UCLA undergrad returns after hiatus to confront discrimination,
change in times
In 1982, I was a 21-year-old third- year English major with a
1.9 GPA.
Without going into too much detail, my domestic situation was a
never ending domino-effect of crash-and-burn living hellishness. It
still is, but now I can afford food, insurance and therapy.
Conditions being what they were, I had no choice but to leave my
beloved UCLA and hit the bricks  head first, so it seemed at
times. As I was taking what would ultimately be my last
cross-campus stroll of the decade, I misjudged the height of a curb
and hyper-whatevered my right ankle. In doing that lurching,
stomping ballet we all do so well when gravity gets feisty with us,
my eyeglasses flew from my face and, by the same laws of physics
that explain the contorted flight path of Oswald’s magic bullet,
came to a full stop on the pavement directly below my rapidly
descending, rapidly accelerating left heel.
Speaking of physics, you know that one about two objects
occupying the same space at the same time? Phooey. Dare I say the
result was particularly spectacular. If Rodin had been around to
see me as I regarded my shattered, and now somewhat out-of-focus
frames, he would have done a new sculpture and called it "The
Loser."
I hated those glasses, not for being mangled, not for constantly
slipping down the bridge of my nose, and not for being so out of
adjustment that they’d fit a beach-ball, but for the inescapable
irony of it all. My broken glasses assumed the role of instant
metaphor; my glasses stood for my vision, "vision" in the other
sense of the word. "Vision" as in future. I slipped the pieces into
my pocket, then changed my mind and hurled them into a nearby hedge
and walked away, from them and UCLA, from my vision and my
future.
Of course, I was wrong, I didn’t walk away from my future, I
just walked into a different one. As we CUT TO: Summer, 1994. After
a 12 year absence from UCLA, I returned. Nothing had changed.
Everything had changed, the little things, the big things. I
remembered Murphy, I’d never heard of URSA. I remembered Calvin and
Hobbes as being philosophers. I could distinctly recall some of the
things I’d learned in my classes, but not what brand of backpack
was "hip" (excuse me, I meant "dope," no make that "phat," or is
"sweet" better? "Da shit"?).
Should I say, for the sake of being sentimental (or hopelessly
pathetic), that I went back to the hedge to look for some vestigial
shred of that fateful day’s events, a testament to just how ugly
ugly can get? Or proof that there’s always hope? I didn’t. Why?
Because I’d been somehow blessed during those years away. I’d
started my own business, played house, even purchased new glasses.
During those years away, things were …constant, especially one
thing: rarely a day passed where I didn’t dream about going back to
school. I knew that the longer I waited, the longer my odds were of
ever being a "returning" (read "o-l-d-e-r") student. I also
anticipated the possibility that it might not be fun, or I might
not be welcomed back, or that my real-time friends and associates
would call me Peter Pan behind my wings. I just wanted my BA. I
wanted to walk. I dreamed of that
Cross-18k-gold-filled-ball-point-pen-and-matching-mechanical-pencil-set.
So I came back, full time, no apologies, a 19th-year English
major.
My transition from working stiff to student was somewhat less
traumatic that I had thought it would be. I found some solace in
reminding myself that people, for any number of reasons, were more
inclined to change careers than they had used to be. My
understanding is that earlier in the century one picked a career
and generally stuck with it for the rest of his or her life. Life
was shorter. Changing careers was discouraged. Going back to school
was … eccentric.
But things had changed … hadn’t they? As I entered a college
lecture hall for the first time in over a decade (not true, but
sounds dramatic) I was surprised to see that the majority of my
fellow college students weren’t fellow college students. They were
high school students … "Summer Discovery" students to be precise.
To put things into perspective for you (assuming you are an
undergraduate in your late teens or early twenties), imagine
walking into your first class at UCLA and finding it full of
elementary school kids. Suppressing my dismay and my impulsive
desire to flee, I stepped into the queue of students lined up to
receive the obligatory first day handouts.
At the end of the line slouched an "elderly gentleman" (more
elderly than myself, to say the least and whom I rightly assumed to
be a T. A.). I, loathe to stand out any more than I already did,
got in line with everyone else. He was an odd looking character, a
bit disheveled, and perhaps a bit too committed to a je ne sais
quoi hippie-chic fashion statement. As I moved up in line, I
realized he wasn’t just sporting a poorly timed infestation of
retro rash. This guy, it seemed, didn’t know, or worse, shouldn’t
even be told about, The Gap and Starbucks; about Jerry Garcia, the
entrepreneur, hawking executive neckwear; about CK’s hundred dollar
hip-hugging bell-bottoms.
He reminded me of David Crosby, the musician. Not the original
David Crosby we’d like to remember, but the one who showed up later
on CNN for doing bad things with illegal substances. I expected him
to smell of carrot juice and patchouli oil.
As I finally reached the front of the line, he took one look at
me and said: "Aren’t you a little old for this class?" He might as
well have just slapped me. I couldn’t think of anything reasonable
or intelligent to say in response, so I just blurted out "Look
who’s talking," snatched the syllabus from his sausagey-fingers and
fumed back to my perch in the back row.
This single moment, perfectly crystallized in my memory, turned
out to be a fairly meaningful experience for me, for at that point
where I had most feared being judged on account of my age, I had
done that very thing to someone else. I had forgotten the lesson
that I’d been praying everyone else already knew. I knew it
intuitively, I knew it as a social fact-o-life, but I didn’t know
it in my heart. So I did a little research: people are living
longer; there are more things to do in life.
In the ’40s , you couldn’t be a firefighter or police officer if
you were a woman. Male flight attendants? Female account
executives? Probably not. Look at the list of occupations in the
IRS booklet that comes with your 1040. Think of the industries and
jobs that would have sounded like science-fiction 50 years ago:
imagine trying to explain to someone that you hack automated teller
machines, that you build web pages, or that you deal in
black-market cloned cell-phones. They’d think you were nuts. And
they’d shoot you if you told someone 50 years ago that you had a
satellite dish on your roof. But you’d survive because now we have
paramedics and defibrillators. Life is longer. Things change. And
as I make my rounds through life and people say, as they ultimately
do: "And what do you do?" I tell them that I’m an English major at
UCLA. It’s nice.
It feels right, but, paradoxically, there are times when it
isn’t.
There was a woman who appeared to be in her late 50s in one of
my classes last year. One day, as she was making her way to her
seat, one of the guys in the row ahead of mine said a bit too
loudly to one of his friends: "Hey bro, what’s your mom doing
here." They all laughed at their harmless little joke, but it
wasn’t harmless; she had heard them. I could see it on her face.
What I can only suppose is that they hadn’t considered the
possibility that this woman was someone else’s mother. I guess they
should all hope that their mothers don’t ever go back for that
second degree, lest they be insulted by some other mother’s
insensitive sons.
This brings me to the point of my spiel. In our society, age is
a paradox, something seemingly contradictory in its tenets, phases
or qualities. It’s all relative. X seems old, until you’re X + 10.
Ageism, internalized or projected, is one of those unsavory biases
we all endeavor to avoid. But honestly, the thought of an
85-year-old going out with a 19-year-old has, to my sensibilities,
its own unsavory aspects. By my own patently ageist example I have
illuminated one of the sticky boogers that fuels the age paradox.
We are generally of a mind that one (having reached the age of
consent) can do as one wishes. Sounds nice but it’s not true. Age
isn’t a factor unless you’re under 35 and want to run for president
of the U.S., or over 35 and want to enlist in the Marine Corps. Age
isn’t a factor unless one wants to continue to work but can’t
because of some mandatory retirement policy pinned on some
arbitrary number. Age counts. Age doesn’t count. Paradox.
The age paradox is a manifestation of a societal paradigm shift.
In "The Disappearance of Childhood," Neil Postman believes, as the
title suggests, that childhood  and to a lesser degree those
phases which follows childhood, namely adolescence and early
adulthood  are social constructs which have lost their reason
for being. He argues that childhood is an age-based contrivance, an
arbitrary incunabula, orchestrated by those who felt that children
were somehow special and discrete and deserving protection from
their counterpart class of humanity: adults. In the Middle Ages,
childhood was considered to have come to its own end by age seven.
Although it’s difficult to imagine an eight-year-old as anything
other than a child, Postman tells us that there was, until the 17th
century, no word in English, French or German to describe a person
between the ages of seven and 16. At that time any word used to
describe a young man could be used equally appropriately to
describe a man in his 50s. He concludes that the traditional lines
that divide age groups in our society are blurring.
As evidence, consider these real-life examples which in today’s
spectacle-driven media climate elicit little more than a
half-hearted shrug of indignation, but would have in the
not-too-distant past have been the germs of national outrage:
consider pre-teens with multi-million dollar movie deals, consider
the prosecution as an adult of a nine-year-old for first-degree
rape. These blurred lines also apply to the other side of the age
spectrum, apparent when we consider the social, political and
fiscal de-classification of the elderly as an autonomous group
deserving (and rightly so) some special measure of attention. And
then there is the issue of 36-year-old English majors.
So what am I saying, that there’s no difference between the
ages? Certainly not, there is a huge difference. But whatever that
difference may be, I am at a loss to identify it. Therein lies more
of the paradox. I’ve met students, far younger than myself, who are
far more mature, a hundred times smarter, more focused, more
spiritual, funnier, nicer, more evolved, you name it. And I know
folks a lot older than myself who in all respects have missed the
boat and have it seems nothing to show (mentally, intellectually,
physically, whateverly) for their time on this plane. I look around
trying to distinguish what exactly it is that distinguishes me
vis-á-vis age from anyone else, be them 16 years older or
younger, and I am at a loss.
Sure, I have probably been to more movies. I vaguely remember
watching Walter Cronkite report on U. S. losses to Vietcong
guerrillas and wondering why we were at war with monkeys. But
beyond just the sheer number of days I’ve been alive, I am left to
wonder if that difference is really ever worth calculating, or if
the paradox has any satisfying solution. I remember when it seemed
that the whole world existed within the 213 area code; 818 and 310
were still just three digit numbers that had yet to become
signifiers of status. We all seem to know that there is a
difference, some palpable, tangible concrete distinction between
the ages, and there must be, but besides the fact that my physical
container is possibly in a more advanced state of entropy than
yours, I can’t define it, so am resigned to simply acknowledging it
and referring to it as the paradox of the ages.