Age is, like, Relative and Stuff, Anyways

There’s something so tremendously daunting about that “submit” button.

Two members have left the nest, and there’s only 47 years worth of (postpartum) human life in the house this weekend. Though I see those years as differently as my Philosophy classmates do. Bear with me while I get there:

“How did your paper go?” They asked. A couple of girls who sit in the front row alongside me. Come to think of it, I’m the only boy in the front. Five girls and me. And the whole second row is girls. I would do a headcount of boys and girls, but then I’d be tempted to apply that information sociologically based on what the class is, and wind up drawing some undesirable conclusions of a too-political nature about the gender makeup of certain fields in relation to personal choices. I would never do that, you know.

“How did your paper go?” They asked.
“By hand, mostly.”
“No, come on. How did you do on it?”
“I did well.” I don’t like grade comparisons. It’s the equivalent of getting to know someone at the party by opening with “what do you do for a living?” Probing for status.
“Yeah but, like, how well?”
“I got 135.”
“You got an A?”
“I got an A.”
“Well, yeah, I mean, you’re a little older, too. I mean, like, you’ve done more. Like you’re wiser -”
“This isn’t getting any better for you.”
“How old are you, anyway?”

They asked me my name, and said some nice things about my contributions in class. 5 weeks in, and the people sitting next to me don’t know my name. My t-shirt should read “I’m not an asshole, I’m an introvert.” I’m not even that quiet. I speak up in class, I chat a quite a bit, I joke. I just miss all the standard social checkpoints. Like, you know, names. It’s also possible that for the kids in class, the old guy in the room is enough of an oddity that it’s hard to know how to approach him. I could buy that. I do have a hard time seeing myself as significantly older than them, though. My children are 6 and 9 years old, so through that lens, my 20-something classmates might as well be my age. This is where it gets good:

“How old are you, anyway?”
“That wasn’t very delicately put, was it?”
“Sorry, there’s just, I don’t -”
“I’m 41. Forty-one.”
“HOLYSHITNOWAY.” And now the teacher is listening. And laughing. He is Sven(!) as previously referenced, and he is older, even, than me. Srsly. Class begins.

Philosophy is probably as good a class as any for ambiguation of ages, inasmuch as age has anything to do with identity. We’ve been going on interminably about identity (existence, to be far, far more accurate) for the past couple of weeks. And age isn’t any more relevant to the conversation than toenail thickness. We either are or we aren’t, and being 41 or 21 or 11 hasn’t any bearing on that. Being dead might not even have any bearing on it.

The Victorians are dead, as are the Romantics, and here I reach didactically back to the beginning of this post and my lamentation about “submit” buttons.  They are daunting, and especially today, as one such button was a necessary condition for the submittal of my British Literature Midterm. But my God how fun it was to answer those questions. I mean, check this out:

1. Use the following passage, including literary features like imagery, character, and repetition, to explore the theme of home(s) in Great Expectations.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? For realz, tho. A question like that tickles all the right places in my mind. Probably not so for you, but that’s ok. I’ve walked through the stark and dead computer sciences/engineering building, peered into the rooms lined with zombification screens and vitamin D supplements. You can keep all that. It’ll serve you better when asked by a stranger what you do for a living, but that’s where my envy ends. I love a question like that one up there because it lets me think and write things like this:

Home is “bodily pain.” Home doesn’t even exist, or at least he doesn’t have one. And as he contemplates it, the only names that come to him are not Joe or Biddy, as it should be. They have a home, and it is not his. The names he conjures are instead the decidedly unsafe characters of Estella and Provis, who are features of the home he went in search of. With Estella being a star – entirely unattainable. And Provis being proviso – a condition attached to an agreement. So even if there is anything like home, it is either beyond Pip’s reach, or it is conditional – incomplete. Ultimately, no matter how he conjugates his approach to the idea of home, he doesn’t end up there. He doesn’t even know home as a place – as a noun. He calls it a “vast shadowy verb I had to conjugate.” Verbs are not destinations. You cannot arrive at a verb, or settle into a verb, or be comforted by a verb. Also “vast and shadowy,” as in without any real form, and a verb that he “had to” conjugate. It’s not even voluntary. It’s an obligation, which could also be called a sentence. Pip’s fears and confusion are a sentence to homelessness.

Now go read Great Expectations again. It’ll change your life.