Some context to start with: I am what is now called a "non-traditionally aged" student in an engineering program, with "non-traditional" meaning "older than some of the professors". Moreover, as a self-employed person who works from home and has no American TV programming piped in, I am more detached from today's youth culture than most of my staring-into-the-cold-dead-eyes-of-middle-age generation.
One would think that being a full-time student on an urban college campus might help offset some of these factors, but it doesn't in my case. The engineering school is tucked off at one end of campus in its very own building and, other than rare visits to the registrar's office and the bookstore, I haven't had much reason to venture deeper into the hive of student activity. Since I already have a bachelor's degree, I don't have to take any general ed. classes (or so I've been told. We'll see what happens when I turn in my application to graduate. "Why, Grits, you haven't met the Art Appreciation requirement. You can't be designing computer chips without a properly developed sense of aesthetics!") and therefore I am taking only engineering classes, more or less, which are all held in the engineering building.
And so, while I spend my days surrounded by youth from America and many other countries, these youth are all engineering students and, by the standards of their peers, they are dweebs. Their pants fit, their secondary sexual characteristics are covered, and most of them wear coats and sweaters when it's cold out. They have opinions about the relative merits of different Linux releases. They get excited to the point of dancing if they can get a good price on a router or score a free copy of Matlab or AutoCad (not that I know anyone who has). I fit right in. It's not until I leave the cloister of the engineering building that I even realize how not mainstream the situation is.
This semester, however, I have to take a math class located in the business building. To get there, I must walk through crowds of piercèd children. Children who have injected copious amounts of ink into the surfaces of their skins. Children wearing tank tops and no coats, even as snow covers the sidewalks. Children with white-people dreadlocks. (Let it be said, I think dreadlocks look great, but I've only ever seen one white person with dreadlocks who looked great.)
And, looking around at the alternatives, I have to say that it is a far, far better thing to be a dweeb. It is far, far better to be out of touch than I could have known.
440 words | February 5, 2004 09:21 PM | Ivory tower