Here’s the rundown of my life so far in college, a place I never thought to be again, and perhaps somewhere I shouldn’t be, not a t my age. I say to people that I am old and though thirty-six isn’t young, I don’t actually feel old beyond a few aches that I never noticed before. Then I arrived at college a few weeks ago and bam! Pow! Right in the kisser with the age-punch I never saw coming.Those kids are young, but it isn’t in the way they look, which is obvious, but in the way they think. They’ve come from a different education system than the one I grew up in and I guess... it irritates me. A grumpy (old) man am I? Maybe I am, maybe I’m just out of touch, or maybe I forget that once I was nineteen and thought I knew everything.
Of course, that’s part of the problem, knowing everything. In comparison to the kids in my class, I will claim an advantage now in terms of knowledge and I’ll claim that same advantage for my nineteen year old self, too. It goes beyond the spelling errors (adgenda? When the fuck did they put that second ‘d’ in there?), or not knowing how to write in cursive (I’m sorry to Mrs. Morang, my sixth grade teacher, who struggled so hard to teach me legible cursive, since apparently that sort of thing doesn’t matter anymore). Turning in papers for class that are handwritten instead of typed is a thing now, I guess (it is 2012, with fucking computers practically inserted in our asses, right?), but even that doesn’t burn me the most or make me feel ancient.