COMMIE GIRL: WHEN OLD PEOPLE GO BACK TO SCHOOL, THEY TAKE IT FOR SERIOUS
By Rebecca Schoenkopf
I kept telling people I was going to grad school, but didn’t exactly offer where. Once they inevitably asked, I’d make my embarrassed face and positively mumble: “USC.” Oh, how terrible USC is! Ask anyone who just got cut off by someone in a Beemer with USC plates. They will be happy to tell you! At length!
Except it turns out my program is awesome, and I love it so much I can’t even stand it, and I leave my house by 7:10 am to take my 550 express bus straight to campus, and I read my Jane Jacobs books for the fall term, which is still weeks away, on the bus, and during breaks, and at home at night, completely abandoning my friend the television, who has been there for me so faithfully all these terrible years, and I do all my homework so far ahead of time because I am so old, and when old people go back to school, they take it for serious.
Here, please have an example! When my mama went back at 40 or so to get her bachelor’s after two decades housewifin’, she got a paper back from her professor and was convinced her professor had it in for her and was out to get her and hated her soooo much to give her such a terrible grade, out of spite and vengeance, because she got a B-plus. That’s how serious old people are!
And so here is what Jane Jacobs says: that without cities agriculture never would have developed, because of how cities are way more bitchen at creating new work to add to old work, like how Ms. Ida Rosenthal went and invented the brassiere on top of (or under) her dressmaking work, I don’t know, she’s cool, you should look her up, and the most efficient cities will eventually stagnate and die because they’re too good at making just one thing, like the Indian dudes in Kerala I saw on No Reservations (TELEVISION!) making the best copper pots in the entire world for centuries in a row but they are poor now because once you’re too good at doing just one thing eventually someone else figures out how to do it for cheaper. Ask the Mancunians*! They were such hot shit with their mills and so forth, and now they all lie about the streets and knife each other drunkenly.
And what does a city do when it’s in decline? It makes bureaucratic make-work for its underemployed denizens, and that’s how you come up with rigid regulations that no one’s got the authority to suspend. They are all just like, “You are right! That is a terrible policy! I am so sorry that there’s nothing about it that I can do!”
Here is a for-instance.
