I am beginning to wander into the realization that I am old. It isn’t just the gray hair. It’s the way people look at me anymore. I’m used to being seen with a sense of strangeness as a black man in primarily white or asian spaces. That brings a certain expectation of stares along with it. Lately these stares reflect a different kind of otherness as I find myself spending more and more time in spaces inhabited by younger people who, unsurprisingly, view me as practically ancient. I am a 50 year old man who feels like a 35 year old man most of the time, and that sense of being part of that grouping rarely plays well with that grouping or the much younger souls (be it students or basically apparently everyone else on the streets or the beach) that I am around. To the world, I am an old head. To the actual old heads, I’m… I don’t know what I am to them, to be honest.
This wasn’t supposed to be the subject of the post, but 5 minutes in, here we are. I’ve spent quite a turn thinking through the strangeness of age, and I do not have more to say on the matter. So, I’ll fall into…
Some Thoughts:
- The high schooler received his first Game Day invitation. These are not formal offers and may or may not constitute an official visit. An official visit usually features a phone call and the flights and room are covered. If this winds up being what it is, then this is an incredible achievement for the kid. He’s been super geeked to get an offer, and junior year is when these things start to really become solid, as opposed to freshman and sophomore ‘offers’ which basically amount to a team being interested in seeing how your HS career actually unfolds. So, we’re gonna see what they are really offering here in terms of what we can afford to do…