After college, age matters in a different way than it does while one is an undergraduate. Some people have their first kid at 23; some at 41; some never. You can get a graduate degree right after you finish Penn or you can take five years off. Sure, people will be more surprised if you're 57 and still living in your parents basement then if you're 24, but still ... slowly but surely, age ceases to become a determining factor in establishing someone's current status. Because up 'til now, the year someone was born has told us basically everything we might need to know about them. At five, you go to kindergarten. At 14, you're a high school freshman. At 18, you start college.
Except, not all of us start college at 18. (And, of course, if you want to get into a socio-economic discussion about America, this becomes even more true, but please look elsewhere for your political commentary -- for your sake, not mine.) Like, for example ... me. I took my year after high school off to live in Israel. I spent the time drinking (alcohol), writing (pretentious) lists and milking (evil) cows. It was fun and sort of like freshman year of college. (Except for the cows.) But I wasn't a freshman in college. I was in the ether of a yearlong deferral.
Still, the weirdest part is what happened after I got back.
Because now I'm old. In a practical sense, I'm only sort of old. I will be 22 in June, and a senior next year. I'm certainly one of the older kids in the class of '06, but not significantly so. Plenty of people will turn 22 in the four or five months after I do. Because of varying cutoff dates, I was always right in the middle of my grade (age-wise) back home, but at Penn I would have been sort of young had I not gone away. I mean, I even have a friend who took the year off, and is still younger than many people who did not.
Still.
Most of my friends from high school are about to graduate. They're finishing theses and applying for jobs, while I worry about internships and off-campus housing. And even my friends from Penn who are seniors will say things like, "I don't think of you as a junior; I think of you as our age." (But I am your age!) Last week, during drinks with a friend and his mom, he explained my situation. "When she tells people, it's sort of like when you tell someone you were adopted," he said. Another person, upon finding out my "age", announced that learning that I graduated high school with the class of '01 made her see me completely differently.
I don't think of you all as ageist. Nobody is mean to me because I am almost elderly. I don't get teased for my white hairs. I do wonder, though, when I will stop thinking of myself as older than I should be. Because in a few years, everyone will just be living life, right? Then, I will be simply Yona. Born 1983, Ramaz class of '01, Penn class of '06 ... with a scar on her pinky from where a cow bit her really, really hard. (Fucking bovines.)
'Coz you know I would walk a thousand miles if I could just see you --
- Yona
