back to school blues, part II...

the students are coming back. they’re appearing more and more frequently in oakland, near campus, with their summer tans and back-to-school wardrobes and their bookstore bags. sigh… proof i’m getting old: the influx of undergrads makes my skin crawl.

when i lived in philly i went through this, too. there were certain bars that i knew it was only safe (tolerable?) to visit in the summertime, when the students were gone and the old city/society hill/rittenhouse square philadelphians were at the new jersey shore (as a southerner/gulf coast island rat/devotee of coastal maine and massachusetts, nothing sounds less appealing to me than the beaches (?) of new jersey…) realistically, i know that i have no more claim to the city of pittsburgh than do the undergrads, even if i have a permanent mailing address here and my daddy doesn’t pay the bills. i’m still a student, a transplant, a wannabe urbanite from a small town.

oh, i'm sure i annoy the undergrads as much as they annoy me. i remember all too well trying to carve out my own niche in the off-the-beaten-path bars of my undergrad days, only to roll my eyes with my undergrad friends at the obnoxious, highfalutin, pretentious snobbery of the grad students who would sit around nearby dark, smoky tables and discuss matters that were certainly more important than our survey classes and university required courses. is there a difference here? i'm not sure... it seems that at that point in my life, despite my outward rejection of the gradstudentspeak and my declarations that advanced degrees were rife with self-indulgence, i still wanted in to that club -- there was something that they had that i couldn't yet get. knowledge? more letters after their names? an unwillingness to drink domestic beers? well, here i am on the other side, and what do i have that i didn't have then? more debt. additional boring-looking books. a five-color highlighting system for reading for class. an expanded vocabulary that my layman friends make fun of. and i still like cheap, domestic beer. sometimes.

maybe i'm only bothered by those undergrads because i’m jealous – they have the freedom to go wherever they want, they’ve got state school debt (instead of my private school debt), they’re cuter and younger and still many years away from wrinkles and their 30th birthdays. or maybe i’m just a total snob. yeah, i’m a total snob. total. snob.