I just love how people come to campus and tell us who we are and what we are. They tell us we're apathetic, boring, sheltered, comatose, dead, or maybe if we're lucky, racist, sexist, and classist.
Whatever they tell us we are, its always because we're sheltered here at the University. You know how it is, Mom and Pop pay the bills, those strange people with hairnets give you food if you show them your ID, and that nice lady cleans the toilet. Heck, you can even go to the store and buy stuff with your ID. Everyone knows that if you can use MCard, it means you don't have to pay for it.
People try to convince us that because we're not starving, alcoholic, homeless people, or button-pushing, hourly-wage, blue-collar zombies, somehow the experience that we're living isn't a real one.
I couldn't imagine why -doesn't everyone sit around in their suburban houses listening to the Smiths, reading from Marcel Proust, and playing cards into the night? Seriously, I looked at my parents and my friends' parents and my older friends, and I didn't see any reason to believe that things would be different after college.
When I started writing this, I wanted to blast these people for saying my life was unrealistic, but as I started, I had a frightening realization: they're right.
When I was four years old, and still riding a Big Wheel, I used to look at the kids who considered themselves adults (they were probably twelve) and was absolutely infatuated with their lives. I made plans for what I would do when I became older, about doing the grown-up things that they did. As soon as I got there, though, I was confronted with even older people, who went to some place called High School and drove cars. As you can probably guess, next I found out about this college thing (and of course, I wanted to go) and now that I am here, everyone is talking about the real life and the work-a-day world, and how, despite the fact that I cook for myself and work during the summers to help pay for school, I'm basically just an overgrown kindergartener, and that I really haven't surpassed the Big Wheel days by much.
I've come to the conclusion that as I progress in life, I'll never escape the belief that I'm living just to the left (or right) of reality. It's like that off-white color. It's not white, and yet its not beige. This world I live in isn't quite reality, but its not quite utopia either.
However, at least for me, the whole point of college is to tiptoe around that whole world of boring, menial jobs and lives not worth the living. I came here because I want to do something that I'll actually enjoy for the rest of my life.
On the other hand, it will probably make me economically comfortable as well. That's where the problem comes in. That's what insures that I'll step into another life after the U-M that's not the real world. With any luck, I won't ever know unemployment or have to turn to the bottle to drown my sorrows.
That's what I mean by the Ivory Tower Syndrome. It's that hopeless feeling that there's another world out there that we can never understand, and even if we try to, no one would ever admit that we do. When I meet someone here who knows what the real world is like, I always love to listen to them and get some feeling for what they've experienced, but its still incomprehensible to me.
I haven't figured out how to deal with this. I don't think there's any way to become part of this real world, at least not any way I can accept. At the same time, I don't see my world as any better or worse than the real world; just different. And yet, there's a kind of disconnection, a kind of gap between me and the few people I meet around here that aren't like me in this respect.
I tried watching MTV's show, the Real World, but I came to the conclusion that it is the only show on TV that is more unrealistic than Beverly Hills 90210. I tried to pick things up in the summer factory jobs I was ÒblessedÓ with for the past couple of years, and I did catch a little bit, but I'm still trying to decipher those few tidbits, now, months later.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to say that I'm rich and that everything's been provided for me, and that that makes me better than everyone else. I'm really not, it really doesn't, and this isn't just a money issue anyway. While financial security seems to be a prerequisite to Ivory Tower Syndrome, the biggest part of it is the outlook. Here, covered by a canopy of maize and blue, where soup grows on trees in Campbell cans and pizza is a food group, we have the time to orient our lives on specific goals, and devote ourselves to accomplishing them.
This isn't so much a privilege as it is a responsibility. I don't want to sound egocentric, but the people who have this chance will be the ones who effect their fields the most, and who will have the most profound impact on the world. Einstein was never the guy in the back of class complaining that the lectures are too theoretical and have no application in real life.
Whether or not we like to admit it, the issues we face in the Ivory Tower are just as momentous as the question of life and death -they are questions of emotional and intellectual life and death.
The thing that bothered me to begin with is that when we dismiss our time here as being a sheltered, unrealistic experience, we somehow come to the conclusion that our time here is unimportant as well. We decide that the skills we hone here and the knowledge we obtain will never be used again, like the pile of stuff in the closet that came from the Home Shopping Network. When we do this, we take a great opportunity and flush it down the toilet.
I guess, now that I look at the big picture, Ivory Tower Syndrome isn't a curse, a blessing, a myth, or a limited experience. It just is. Its the interface we have with life and the only one we'll ever have. I don't know about you, but I plan on making the best of it.