more, harder, heavier

Maybe its just the year I was born, or maybe its just dumb luck, but somehow, everywhere I've worked and everywhere I've studied, I've come in for the year that everything has gotten more intense. In school I came in for the first year that the freshman class was so vast we overflowed the housing and wound up taking over two hotels. When I studied abroad it was the biggest class of international students they'd ever encountered and there was another housing crunch. In the Hamptons it was the heaviest show load the theatre had ever encountered with the least amount of time. Berkeley also took on the most interns they'd ever had and, lo and behold, another housing crunch. Now my Opera is 17 housing units short and is putting on the most shows they've ever tried in a summer, which means I'm rooming in a pantry and better appreciate it.

My whole Life has been like this. Always the first time we've tried this, and its always more than the institution is prepared to handle. Always above and beyond capacity, both for space and stress. For some reason folks tend to forget that when you try to build upward, its a good idea to build outward too so the tower doesn't teeter.

I'm getting tired of it, frankly. I'm sick of feeling crammed in by establishments that are not capable of handling the bulk. Feeling marginalized and perpetually reduced to child-status by companies that have no room to move upward, so they just shove bigger and bigger groups through on the bottom floor, in one door, out the other. I know a lot of money has already gone toward establishing this point long before now, but its starting to strike home with me. The human lifespan has increased so the retirement age has increased. Which means older people are holding onto jobs longer. So employment turnover has slowed. What's more, social security benefits have dropped, pensions are a thing of the past, and a lot of investment plans have tanked as major corporations have dealt underhandedly, so even folks who are of age to retire can't without being put out on the street. There's not enough money to go around, so everyone is working more, longer, and harder to try and get enough, which means more people are earning more so inflation has ballooned to compensate. This sucks enough for older people who are desperately trying to hold on to the income they have to try and slowly pay for their hip replacement ten years ago with the petering assistance of Medicare, but let's think how this is affecting everyone else. Me, for example.

My university took on more students than it could dream of handling comfortably in order to make more money in 2002. The school was literally bursting at the seams. Now, most universities are comfortable in the knowledge that they're going to lose a huge chunk of their entrants by the end of their second year due to drop-outs and transfers, so freshman and sophomore-level general ed classes are designed to accommodate for thousands of students while junior and senior level classes are smaller and more specific, to accommodate for the significantly smaller number of students who actually survive long enough to get into them. This is nothing new. Unfortunately, in this day of job competition when we know that you can't even work at Starbucks without a BA, the pressure is on for each entrant to graduate, even if they're not really college material. While this has affected the per capita suicide and therapy entry rates to a degree, the biggest impact it has actually had is the ballooning of college graduation rates. I'm convinced that the university of south carolina, seeing a potential for monetary gain, has intentionally dropped the difficulty level of most of its liberal arts courses--and phased out professors who would keep the intellectual commitment high in order to preserve the integrity of education--in order to increase the number of people who pay to stay in four or more years. Which has devalued the bachelor's degree to nearly that of the high school diploma or GED. I graduated with a Pack Of Nimrods. There were some bright students dotted in there, but a large majority of my graduating class was...dumb. But I have the same degree as the rest of them, so on paper we're all worth the same.

Which means, of course, that eventually I'll have to go to grad school--an institution that is also being flooded by folks who want to increase their chances of survival. Eventually, if the trend continues, I can imagine the Ph. D will work out to have the CV value of an 8th grade graduation ceremony. As bigger and bigger packs of young educated people flood the overwhelmed job market and corporate heads squeeze each downsized department tighter and tighter, i can only foresee revolution...or collapse.

As it stands, each year I age has tended to become a year further from adulthood. My mom was a grown-up at 18. My older cousins were deemed mature at 21. Ten years later i don't imagine I'll be taken seriously as an adult until i'm 30. I can only expect my jobs to be a series of low-paid temporary gigs in pathetic, crumbling housing, herded in groups of my equally frustrated, overeducated peers like some sick travesty of a summer camp where we're made to clean toilets and sweep floors and only discuss philosophy in undertones when the boss-man looks away.

ugh. I'm gonna apply to Yale.