Summer on the Berkeley campus is weird. While it’s nice to imagine that most of the students vanish, due to the tuition increases many more of them stick around to take summer classes. Classes are so impacted during fall and spring that a big percentage of undergrads take 5 years to graduate, which has become financially untenable for a lot of people, so they cram a few courses into summer in order to accelerate their escape. And a lot of new students come to campus in the summer to find housing, attempt to understand the illogical campus layout, and buy lots of overpriced Cal branded shirts. Yesterday I was walking from the gym to the library, normally a deserted path around this time of year, when two massive tour groups of incoming freshman in Cal hoodies swooped past me. My initial annoyance with this passed in a couple of moments, because I finally got hit by the phenomenon colleagues have described for years: they looked like babies. I think it was because so many of the guys had Beiber bangs. It was hard to believe they weren’t wearing diapers under their jeans.

I don’t have kids, so this idea that young people look young is a lot different than gradually watching someone grow up. When I see my friends’ kids or my nieces, the experience is more like watching a slide show with missing slides — hey, s/he’s walking! Oh, s/he’s in college! Shit, that happened fast. But when it comes to people older than me, it’s also a blur. I seriously cannot figure out how old people are by looking at them. Everyone between thirty and fifty looks the same age, and past fifty I usually lump everyone into their sixties, only to find out a lot of them are actually in their seventies and eighties. So I frequently underestimate people’s ages by decades, which is flattering, sure, but kind of disconcerting from my end. Having had older parents, grandparents who lived into their late nineties, and older siblings born nearly a decade before me, maybe I’m just used to thinking of older people as my peers. And that’s fine, but this sudden awareness that teenagers look like children after years of thinking they look like adults is really freaking weird. I’m still embarrassed about the time I referred to my iPod as a Walkman in class and my students teased me about it for months. Then again, they were born in the nineties*. Let’s just let that sink in.

*On a related note, a friend recently commented that going to the upcoming Pavement reunion concert was going to mean mingling with balding, pear-shaped peers, and that Berkeley would have a run on babysitters that night. I’m not attending that particular concert, but I drove by the Temescal (Oakland’s Williamsburg) street fair last week and gawked at the number of straw fedora sporting, ironically tattooed moms and dads. Generation X, welcome to the sedate years, now featuring cash-in nostalgia reunions by your favorite bands, who have their own babysitters to pay.

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