Is This What Getting Older Feels Like?

Last week at LDSBC, one of my students facebook-stalked me and asked if I knew Nina Shurtleff. I said yes, she and I were classmates when I was a recent RM and she a college freshman. He replied that she was his MTC Teacher.

Oh my. That made me feel old on so many levels.

Related Example: A common ice-breaker activity I use starts of semesters is to ask students who their favorite musical act is. This semester I started getting "Skrillex." Confessing my ignorance, I youtubed him. I couldn't finish a song. It was the first time in my life I listened to new music and not only didn't like it, but didn't even understand why anyone else could like it.

"It's just a bunch of noise!" I exclaimed, "It makes no sense at all, it's stupid, it's terrible, why do kids listen to this, why do I suddenly sound like my parents?! Get off my lawn!"

Even just a few years ago, when I finally weened myself off pop radio, I could flaunt my love of Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio and so forth as clear evidence that I was avaunt-guard, that I'd deprogrammed myself of corporate brain-washing, that I was hip, I was cool, that I was a boundary-pushing artist and connoisseur of the sublime. If kids 3 years my younger were still into Emo, I'd just coolly smile at their needy immaturity. But with Skrillex, I now wonder if I'm just plain old out of touch.

It's easy to hate on contemporary pop when you're 16, you see--it was in High School that I first began hunting the Classic Rock stations, and getting into Radiohead and White Stripes, all to avoid the pop-radio-saturation of the Britney Spears and N'Sync I couldn't stand.

But if you hate teen pop at 28, you start to wonder if you're instead becoming a cranky ol' close-minded curmudgeon, forever annoying young people with tales of how much better Frank Sinatra and The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Nirvana was than whatever kids these days are into, and get off my lawn and etc--even if there's every possibility that if I was 16 today, I'd still hate Skrillex.

I suddenly, sadly, understand why old people get so defensive against new music--they feel threatened. We all want to feel that we don't like something because we have good taste, not because we've lost the ability to acquire new tastes, that our minds have finished expanding, that we can no longer grow up but only older. We're threatened by the haunting specter of death, you see. Hence, we must loudly and repeatedly declare that the music of our generation is better because it's best, and not just cause it's familiar.

Perhaps this fear of age and death is also why some middle-aged persons overcompensate in the other direction, following youth fashions and music trends with a fervor approaching desperation (a phenomenon I noticed while wandering City Creek Mall last week), ironically alienating the youth they worship, all to stave off the awareness of their mortality just a tad longer.

Try as I might though, I still hate Skrillex.

Of course, I'm at that strange age where the inverse occurs, too. I've taught a number of students old enough for me to have gone to High School Prom with--shoot, I've taught students old enough to be my parents.

I generally avoid revealing my age to these students when they inevitably ask--not for my sake you see, but for theirs, cause I don't want to come off as some brash young whippersnapper with an MA too big for his britches, presupposin' to give 'em some college educatin' while they're just starting their AA, even though they're the one's with real life learnin'.

And they do know things I don't know, all my students do. I just don't want to look like a jerk, for I'm still a child in many of their eyes.

Meanwhile, just tonight, my Dad and Aunt were talking about how "60 is the new 40," how my Aunt now considers folks in their 60s to be youngins'. It appears that the definitions of "old" and "young" will remain fluid, slippery, and purely relative for the rest of my life. That is, I may always be at "that strange age."