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Identity crisis
(PUBLISHED 31 AUG 2004)
By Paul Brynner
Special to the Northern Light
I know that writers are supposed to listen
in on what’s going on around them—scribbling
ideas on secret notepads—but playing the part of the
spy makes me squirm. Besides, in this day and age, who needs
to listen in? People talking on their cell phones are already
displaying their private lives for the world to see via
top-volume exchanges in public places in which every possible
social situation is carried out: breakups, organ donations,
phone sex.
“I’m wearing pink underwear!
What are you wearing? What? Sorry! Can you hear me now?
I said—”
With material like that, why bother with
eavesdropping?
Still, every now and then you can’t
help lending an uninvited ear. Recently, I overheard a conversation
at the table behind me in the Social Science Building cafe.
A girl at least ten years younger than I, talking a mile
a minute, remarked how this campus is just chock full of
what she referred to as “non-traditional students.”
It took me a second of eavesdropping before I realized that
“non-traditional” was a not-so-elegant euphemism
for the word “old,” and another second to realize
that, whether the youngster knew it or not, I was the one
she was talking about.
Turns out, however, she is right. According
to University of Alaska Anchorage’s Office of Planning,
Research and Assessment, half of the student population
enrolled at the Anchorage campus is over the age of 25.
Fifteen percent of students are between the ages of 30 and
39. Another 20 percent are over the age of 40.
The moment of grizzly reflection that followed
was not exactly pretty. Thirty years old and returning to
college, a grown man working out his own mid-life crisis
by going out for a nursing degree. Where are all the comforting
reminders, though, that this is the right path to follow?
Where are the familiar rituals, the rubber band holding
a passel of flat-tipped yellow pencils, the spanking new
Dukes of Hazard lunch box? Where is the brave face I used
to wear as I entered a hallway lined with metal lockers
and filled with the scariest people in the world: my peers?
I don’t know who my peers are anymore.
The world is changing so fast I feel as though I’ve
been exhumed from some ancient burial site, a living artifact
from an age when people didn’t “download”
music from “the web.” Nor, for that matter,
did they have phone sex in public places.
“I’m taking off my left
sock now, slooooowly peeling it away from my left ankle
— hello? Can you hear me now?”
I’m not sure how I should feel about
being a “non-traditional” student. The name
itself might be hard to live up to. How exactly am I supposed
to be non-traditional? Should I sit upside down at my desk,
raising a foot when I need to speak? Should I submit term
papers written in Pig Latin? Maybe it’s time to get
that tattoo on my face I was always thinking about, the
one where Godzilla is giving Jimi Hendrix a piggy-back ride.
I mean, if that doesn’t qualify as non-traditional,
I don’t know what would.
But what would be really non-traditional,
I guess, would be if I actually took off the brave face
and admit to the world that a year older isn’t necessarily
a year wiser. Twelve years out of high school and I’m
still not much closer to sorting out life’s true mysteries.
Is super unleaded really better than regular unleaded? Why
can I grow a beard but not a soul patch? If you sneeze,
belch and hiccup at the same time do you die and go directly
to heaven? And biggest of all, what exactly is that secret
recipe, the one to having a truly happy life?
That’s a tough one. I suppose if I
knew the answer, I wouldn’t be going back to school.
On the other hand, I don’t know that school is the
best place to learn that answer either. In a year at UAA,
my professors have taught me how to dissect a cat, how to
identify a non-polar protein and how to correctly interpret
a urine sample, but no one’s taught me how to be happy.
I guess I’ll just have to keep listening. Maybe I’ll
learn the secret from one of my fellow students. Maybe I’ll
even learn it from someone younger than myself.
Now that would be non-traditional.
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