My career at university began forty
years ago. For quite a long time now, I have been teaching and advising
students for much longer than most of my advisees have been alive. I’m three
generations or more removed from them. (And now, I have been advising longer
than some of my advising
colleagues
have been alive.) With the passing of those generations, I have been encouraged
to familiarize myself with the pop-cultural worlds of Gen-X, Xennials,
Millennials, Gen-Y, and i-Gen, as a form of professional development. I don’t,
in part because I’m not the keenest of “professionals.” That orientation to the
world has something mercenary and bureaucratic about it, necessary, no doubt,
but unfortunate. But more importantly, young people’s
worlds, like my own, are infinitely complex
and not to be rightly felt and understood by interloping geezers.
Instead, I’m quite resigned to becoming
naturally irrelevant and increasingly uncool—not unhappily. And then retire.
They, on the other hand, are sometimes fascinated by the
fact that I have lived in what they know only as
history and seem to appreciate me as a sort of mystical animatronic
survival of days long gone by. A living fossil, a coelacanth, a long-lived
passive drift-feeder—whose primordial habits I’m inclined to admire.
One trend of the current generation I have not been able to
avoid has been the film adaptation of old-time comic super-heroes. They’re everywhere
these days, righting wrongs, salaciously filling out spandex, snarking on
their colleagues, and saving the universe, all the while subverting cinema for
older generations. I didn’t pay much attention to these graphic narrative
busybodies in my own youth, but I cannot escape them now. One has even been
asked, in a professional training icebreaker, to imagine oneself a superhero
and identify a superpower: I,
Superannuated Man, not giving a shit.
Okay, much.
