Awww, I'm the Dad!
Today is Transfer Student Orientation for Sam.
For the last hour-plus, I've been sitting in a too-warm room with too-burnt-orange carpeting in a low-ceilinged meeting room called the Rosa Parks Room. Earlier, Sam noted that we were sitting in the back.
I'd had to sit through a too-perky presentation with too-square cartoons cribbed and scanned and placed on an outdated PowerPoint presentation done up in canary yellow seriffed text on a light blue field.
Straight people, I swear, sometimes.
I'm here while Sam is at the student sessions two floors up in Jack Adams Hall. The man doing the preso is the director of the Career Center, and he's giving a big verbal chuck-on-the-chin to all the “other parents” in the room, encouraging their children to stay vigilant and take the initiative in learning how to be presentable.
Parents laughing at the silliness of haircuts, tattoos and piercings. I'd have to admit that there's no love lost between me and tattooing, but I'm more neutral than anything else. Piercings? Well, some people do look like they've fallen face-first into a tackle box, but a piercing isn't the end of the world.
I guess it's one of the things in not being a parent that makes me less affronted by body manipulation, or less adversarial to the “new generation” at all.
Though, come to think of it, I guess I can see why certain crazies come around here and call me categorically “old”. They've moved through their lives along a certain path that prevents them from being agonistic to “today's youth”: they draw a line at an arbitrary age difference and stand apart. They are old, themselves, no matter what the calendar says.
I'm not saying that chronological age doesn't figure; I'm just saying that culture plays a bigger part in affinity.
Besides, these parents are OLD!