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January 15, 2003 ~ Trick of the Light?
Wednesday.
It happened again. Lately it has been happening every few weeks. An older woman with whom I was talking mentioned how much she appreciated a certain academic, and I agreed how wonderful he was. Then she ranted a bit about how these certain "young women" did not like him at all.
"Maybe it's a generational thing," she went on. "Perhaps we like him, but they don't, because of the age difference." Thereby implying that she was thinking of me as being her age. In actuality, I am younger than the "young women" that she was complaining about, and a few decades younger than herself. I let that comment slide, but suggested that perhaps it was simply a personality clash between those other women and the academic.
Later the same evening, in a different setting, talking with that woman and another older woman, we were discussing the looming possibility of a war with Iraq. They were talking about the first Gulf War with Iraq, and how they had felt about it at the time, and then they asked me what I had thought of it. "Uh... Actually, I was still in grade school at the time..."
They were both a little startled. "Oh... that's right... Do you even remember it?" And so I told them what I remembered.
This has been happening to me a lot, lately. A while back, one woman at the college asked me, "So, does your son or daughter go here?" I avoided the age issue there, too, by simply saying, "No, I'm part of the staff" (rather than pointing out that I myself was a student!), but it took me aback. Lady, do you really think that I am old enough to have an offspring in college?
Do I look that old? People have always mistaken me for older than I am, and now that I have left adolescence behind they are mistaking me for decades older than I am. I mean, that has always happened to me online, because apparently my writing comes across as that of someone much older than me, but that was understandable, since people could not hear my actual voice or see my face online. But now people who meet me in person often add a decade or two to my age.
Morgan thinks that it is because the ways that I think and communicate (which have always seemed older to other people when reading my writing) are now transferring over to the way that I speak, act, and carry myself.
It has been more pronounced, lately, and I don't know quite what to think of it.
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