June 17, 2007

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times, but I haven’t heard it at all, so I guess that’s that.  Moving on to less important things, the other day I learned that I am now* a Master of Computer Science – the culmination of no less than 24 years of education, which is the American word for babysitting.  Granted, there are a few things I learned in the process that I use even today, especially in preschool – when it is and isn’t appropriate to bite people, whether it is better to tell someone that you didn’t quite make it to the potty that time or let them figure it out on their own, etc.  But most of my educational experience has consisted of sitting quietly in box-like rooms, and after 24 years, I think it’s nice to be able to do something else, such as work 40 hours a week in a cubicle.  But it’s hard not to get the impression that most of your educational career could have been replicated by, say, a sea cucumber (except with more frequent vomiting your guts onto passers-by, if you went to Tufts).

This is why graduating produces mixed emotions in me.  It seems to produce mixed emotions in other people, too, in that I’ve seen more excitement and appreciation from people who’ve just discovered that there’s still some chocolate syrup left in the bottom of the bottle.  It’s a bit odd – everyone wants to get in on the celebration of high school graduation, which, according to Alabama state law, can be accomplished just by showing up to class long enough to get state funding and making sure to leave your firearms in your car before passing through the metal detector – in short, nothing a sponge couldn’t do.  In fact, most of the things we hold elaborate ceremonies for in life are things that sponges do on a frequent basis – age another year, die, graduate from high school, absorb nutrients from the surrounding water, etc.  But getting a Masters degree!  It would take at least, like, a mollusk to be able to handle something like that!  Yet, at the same time, I suspect everyone knows that deep down, someone who has completed a graduate degree is really just asking for a pat on the back for being successfully babysat for a few more years, and not everyone is willing to comply.

And who can blame them?  The people who want to get babysat, I mean.  The real world is full of such unlovable things as apartments with astronomical rents and hot water available only between the hours of 3:30 and 4:00 PM, hour long commutes on the train next to men who smell strongly of turpentine and appear to be having an animated conversation with the Gazoo or some other invisible creature who keeps blaming them for things they didn’t do, automobile insurance that costs a billion jillion dollars because Massachusetts wanted to help the little guy (defined as automobile insurance companies), and having to vacuum.  Who wants that?  Wouldn’t you rather wile away the rest of your years in the gray, ordered world of education, with a meal plan and a purpose?

No.  You’d rather wile away the rest of your years on a couch in front of the colored, surreal world of daytime television, with a can of Mountain Dew and a doughnut.  But we’ll take what we can get.

A lot of people my age, it seems, haven’t figured out what they want to be when they grow up, defined as whenever that magic job from heaven falls on you and fulfills you in the way that you were promised by Barney the Dinosaur.  Barney is always telling kids that they can be anything they want when they grow up, joined by advancing squadrons of grinning multiethnic children proudly wearing the uniforms of various non-gender-specific government employees.  “I’m going to be a fireperson!” says one Filipino girl.  “I’m going to be a glareperson at the Department of Motor Vehicles!” says one Kuwaiti boy, and then they all join hands and do a big, smiley dance as though nothing in the world could make them any happier than getting 74 paid holidays and living on your future tax dollars.

But Barney, as usual, is a big, fat liar.  Most little boys and girls don’t start out dreaming of their adulthood careers as the source of all their fulfillment and joy.  This is why, if you ask a girl what she wants to be when she grows up, she’ll probably say, “A mommy.”  Likewise, every little boy wants to be, on the whole, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.  But somehow, over the course of 20+ years of babysitting, children get the idea into their heads that life is all about getting the right job, after which they will be fulfilled and frighteningly smiley, just like those squadrons of skipping multiethnic children they watched so much as a youngin’.

This is why, I suspect, people my age are frequently upset to learn that a job is not, in fact, a dress-up game but a thing requiring (shudder) effort on a (shudder) regular basis, often without so much as a single can of Mountain Dew.  People in previous generations seemed to understand that a job was something you had to do in order to survive, but this is a foreign concept to us perpetually babysat (educated) folks.  We’ve had the first seven or eight layers of the Pyramid of Fulfillment or whatever that crap is they teach you in Psychology class (food, shelter, soap operas) handed to us on a silver platter, but that top layer, “Self-Actualimazation” or whatever, is frustratingly out of reach.

Speaking of Nintendo, I am now the proud owner of the gloriously named Nintendo Wii, so called because it means something goofy in pretty much every language on Earth.  The Wii is a marvelous little white box that sits next to your television.  It lets you, by vigorously swinging your patented Wii Remote around, feel just like you’re really outside exercising - playing tennis, riding a cow, launching balls of monkeys into a watery void - when, in fact, you are merely inside exercising by knocking over lamps and brutally injuring your guests.  You can really work up a sweat playing these games, which is unfortunate for those of us who liked our video games to require all the physical acumen of a wet cabbage, but nice for all those people (usually girls) who enjoy getting to “box” their husbands into submission by flailing more randomly than they are.  This is, objectively speaking, possibly the greatest advance for western civilization in the last 50 years, and I am including spray cheese** in that assessment.

So, really, why grow up?  I’ve got princesses to rescue and nutrients to absorb from the surrounding water.  Plenty of fulfillment to be found yet!
                    
*Just for the record, Microsoft Word would like it to be known that the previous expression “I am now” would be more grammatically correct written as “I is now.”  I did not realize that Microsoft Word came with a language pack for “English (U.S., Huckleberry Finn).”

** I may have to take that back, though, as, according to Wikipedia, Kraft has invented spray cream cheese – it just got possible to be a VERY lazy Yankee.