On Orientations, the Vestigial, and Transition

I have been to six orientations now: first, as a freshman; three times as an orientation volunteer; and twice now as a staff member. I suppose the first orientation will always be poignant for me, though for reasons largely tangential to the event itself (not that it wasn’t full of just as much enthusiasm and saccharine as any other orientation). John Irving says somewhere that one of the hardest things to accept about the passage of time is how things become inextricably wrapped up with parentheses, and this is how I still see that day -- my mother preening as we walked onto campus (she had just 123 days left to live), my sister (she would eventually move across the country) having a probing talk with my RA (he would hook up with one of the freshman girls in of our dorm), and so on. I remember that time as a sort of nexus or transition point from an old life to a new life, with both real and coextant. It’s one of the few times in my life where I really remember what it felt like to be me at the time, but on top of that, I also know how things turn out -- like a double-exposure of memory.

(Lots of events and places around this period are touched by this poignancy, so I try not to put too much stock in the phenomenon itself. I think it is the normal mythos-imbuing tendency of humanity; we no longer treasure the arrow which felled the great bear, or build cairns in the place where we had startling visions, but we still venerate the miscellany that populate our own existences and build our own personal eschatology.)

Back to the orientations. I don’t remember much from year two or three. From year four I remember some feelings of specialness, because I thought it would be my last. There were also some patriarchal feelings as an RA and as a senior, as if I were enjoying my brief stint at the front of the galley before my body was lit on a pyre and pushed out on an ice floe. But numbers five and six: the staff years.

“Alumnus” is the “vestigial present passive participle of alere, ‘to nourish,’” and I assure you that no one feels more vestigial than I do on the day of orientation. Parents and students are experiencing a transition (many, particularly the latter, blissfully unaware of the parentheses that will come to afflict their lives); I am stuck here.

I often wonder if we who work at the university have anything in common with others who are rooted to a place which others experience only in transition. I’ve never known an airport worker, or a subway attendant, or anyone like that, but I wonder if it’s at all similar. I have seen all of these faces before, heard all of these questions.

The parents all blend together. And the students: It’s hard not to want to type them. Many of them do seem to fit common stereotypes. There are the homebodies and the sluts and the people who are embarrassed to have their parents around. But it's also hard not to feel something that approximates love for them. Beneath it all, there are so many worries and hopes and unanswered questions. I wonder who is meeting a fun roommate (who will tragically take her own life fall of her sophomore year), or who will eventually decide to pursue the liberal arts (and then go to law school)? What struggles? What confidences? I want to take them all in my arms and tell them it will all be okay (for most it probably will be, people settle in; and for those who don’t, plenty of people have suffered worse things). Part of me also wants to hurry them. It’s like watching a chrysalis and wanting to shout out at it to hurry up and make a butterfly, but also being transfixed at this one moment of beauty and perfection when it was perfectly caught in transition.

On Employment, Dead Birds, and Fine Stitching

I am the most dreaded of hangers-on: I am a recent alumnus who has become university staff.

This probably doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. After all, universities are nice places overall. Most employees at my university are happy to be there. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining either (much). I like my job and my lifestyle, and I’m comfortable with my choices. But it can still be an awkward situation to wear the scarlet “a” for alumnus.

Here’s the best metaphor I can give. It’s like someone I remember who was adopted, and while she was largely fine with that, she would complain about how many people instantly knew that she was adopted. She was clearly Korean, but she had a very Irish sounding last name. Most people when they met her in classes or whatever assumed (correctly) that she had been adopted, and so without her control people always knew this intimate detail about her and jumped to all these conclusions about her. (The phenomenon was even worse when she was out with her parents, who were both white). For her, it was like having this thing which should be her private knowledge on a big billboard, or, if I may (to keep the Hawthorne reference above company), it was an albatross around her neck.

Now, again, I don’t mean to suggest that being the alumnus-who-has-become-staff (and if that’s not the name of a pulp-comics monster, it should be) is all that bad, or nearly as serious as the example above. But same basic principle is in operation: I have no way to control who knows this fact about me (and a lot of people do). And this fact, of course, comes with its own associations: I am a left-over, a remnant, the collegiate appendix. I am the engine that wouldn’t turn over at the start of the race. Or so it can be perceived.

I don’t think I was any different than the current students when I was one. I knew only two recent alumni who were staff (the “recent” is key here -- if it has been more than ten years or so, I’d say, suddenly being an alumni who has come back becomes cool). One was a tall, overly-thin alum who chose to fulfill painfully trite stereotypes, such as still wearing braces and working in the IT department. The reasons he had stuck around seemed facile in their clarity. The other alum was a nominally-normal guy who chose to work in admissions, though I still felt there was some kind of desperation about him (a projection on my part, I know). For both, the unasked question seemed to be: You worked so hard to get a degree at this prestigious institution, and working in this institution is now the most prestigious thing you can find to do? (To both alums, I can only say: I’m sorry for my prejudice.) (And perhaps there was also some self-defense at work: surely if they were “stuck” at the university, it must be through some personal defect, and thus sticking around was a fate which I would not have to worry about.)

I’m not saying I actively thought about this too often. But I’m not saying these wouldn’t have been my opinions, either. And now I laugh: look at the company I’m in! I don’t work in IT, nor do I wear braces. But is there an air of desperation about me? Do people look at me askance and wonder why I’m still here, or worry that the same fate will befall them?

I don’t know. Somewhere between maybe and probably not. Of course, again, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m rather fond of my scarlet a. The stitching is quite nice.