Life
Life, don't talk to me about life. Brain the size of a planet...
It is times like these where I truly understand the character of Marvin the Paranoid Android. Here I am, in grad school, attempting to teach various undergrads the fine art of microbiology. I stand, apart from their table, occasionally at the front of the classroom. I wander up and down the aisle, and I listen.
I hear what they complain about, I hear what they find 'cool', I hear what upsets them, I hear their life's aspirations. Do they know that I am listening, that I bother to hear anything they say beyond the shadow of what help 'I' can provide them? Quite doubtfully. Yet still they talk.
As they talk I realize the gap that has been occurring since I began to attend graduate school. It isn't necessarily a gap in education, it isn't really a gap in maturity, nor intelligence. Instead it is a strange combination of the three, blending together into something that I can not describe. Something that puts me apart from them, sympathizing with them, but knowing that they could never really understand my point of view.
I can somewhat imagine it would be what a Catholic priest must feel. Here he is, providing guidance, arranging for marriage, performing the ceremony, being a part of the proceedings, yet at the same time apart. Someone who is at one time an intimate part of what is going on, yet due to their life choice, they are also astranged from it all.
I keep forgetting how at their young age I thought that plus or minus ten years was a lifetime away from me. I think at that age it was. Now I encounter people ten to twenty years older and I find the gap in ages much smaller than someone even five to ten years younger than myself. In one moment I talk to a woman who I find attractive, yet at the same time think of her as childish, wandering doe-eyed into the big, scary world.
Part of me wishes that I never found my shadow, that the lost boys were still at my side, that I stayed in never-never land. In one breath I cry for my lost childhood, yet praise my new experience and maturity. Though I still miss my battles with Captain Hook, I am somewhat glad to have given them up.
Drew Russell Davidson
Graduate Student in Microbiology
Dreamer (on hold)
It is times like these where I truly understand the character of Marvin the Paranoid Android. Here I am, in grad school, attempting to teach various undergrads the fine art of microbiology. I stand, apart from their table, occasionally at the front of the classroom. I wander up and down the aisle, and I listen.
I hear what they complain about, I hear what they find 'cool', I hear what upsets them, I hear their life's aspirations. Do they know that I am listening, that I bother to hear anything they say beyond the shadow of what help 'I' can provide them? Quite doubtfully. Yet still they talk.
As they talk I realize the gap that has been occurring since I began to attend graduate school. It isn't necessarily a gap in education, it isn't really a gap in maturity, nor intelligence. Instead it is a strange combination of the three, blending together into something that I can not describe. Something that puts me apart from them, sympathizing with them, but knowing that they could never really understand my point of view.
I can somewhat imagine it would be what a Catholic priest must feel. Here he is, providing guidance, arranging for marriage, performing the ceremony, being a part of the proceedings, yet at the same time apart. Someone who is at one time an intimate part of what is going on, yet due to their life choice, they are also astranged from it all.
I keep forgetting how at their young age I thought that plus or minus ten years was a lifetime away from me. I think at that age it was. Now I encounter people ten to twenty years older and I find the gap in ages much smaller than someone even five to ten years younger than myself. In one moment I talk to a woman who I find attractive, yet at the same time think of her as childish, wandering doe-eyed into the big, scary world.
Part of me wishes that I never found my shadow, that the lost boys were still at my side, that I stayed in never-never land. In one breath I cry for my lost childhood, yet praise my new experience and maturity. Though I still miss my battles with Captain Hook, I am somewhat glad to have given them up.
Drew Russell Davidson
Graduate Student in Microbiology
Dreamer (on hold)