We slowly tire of being mistaken for students
This was really funny: at the end of a Japanese movie we saw with two other Illinois Wesleyan faculty members and another prof's wife, an audience member near us made the comment "It would be great to have that bowing to the teacher ritual here [like what happened at the high school in the movie]." A person in front of our group turned toward us and said, "but would you do it?" thinking that we were students, ignoring the actual students who were sitting right in front of her. It got funnier when a professor who hosted the movie showing made a comment that assumed we were students just a few minutes later, and Andrew finally had to correct her and point out that she was talking to three new faculty members. He kindly didn't point out to the prof's further embarassment that the both of us wives who were present are even older than the three faculty members.
This was not the first instance of both of us together or either of us separately being mistaken for students by people here in town. I have been getting asked since I arrived here if I was new in town because I am a student at Illinois State. It's starting to get a bit tiring when everyone I meet who is more than a couple years older than me (and sometimes those my age or younger) asks the same question. C'mon, Bloomington-Normal, are you folks really so out of touch with youth that you can't tell the difference between people over 30 and people who are 10 or more years younger? Hell, I'm not even youth any more at 33. I know that students older than 22 pop up occasionally, but they are hardly common at IWU, which has only a scant handful, and I can't imagine there are a large number at ISU either.
Well, I haven't been worrying much about this confusion about my age. Wouldn't want to lose sleep over it. Might make my newly-acquired crow's feet get deep enough that you'd see them even when I'm not smiling. Andrew has always looked like he could possibly be older than me even though he's two years younger, so I'm doubly confused about people assuming he's 20 years old. He just wearily shrugs it off and continues not to wear a tie for work because he's not worried about what people think either.