It happened this past weekend. The final nail in my “I still feel young” coffin was hammered into place. My wife and I (yes, my wife, surprisingly getting married wasn’t the last nail in the coffin) went back to my alma mater to soak in nostalgia, indulge in delicious food from our favorite restaurants, and take a break from New York City’s soul-crushing grip for a few days.
I knew going in that I would feel old hanging around a college town, but I wasn’t prepared for what happened at Judy’s, a restaurant we used to frequent. We sat down and the waiter came to take our drink order. I asked him what kind of beers they had and he read off the list. I ordered a Stella as my hand started toward my pocket to pull out my I.D. The waiter made a strange, almost knowing face and said, “Okay” and walked toward the bar. He didn’t card me and I think he did it on purpose. He didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of getting carded. This is a college town mind you, everyone gets carded.
The waiter came back and took our food orders and headed to the table next to us. The customer ordered a beer and the waiter says, “Can I see your I.D.?” My wife started laughing as my jaw hit the floor. She comforted me by saying that he “looked really young” but my heart was broken.
We headed to McMurphy’s, a bar next door, and I took little solace when the bartender carded me. She was just being polite and covering her ass because Amherst cops are fucking bastards and bars have to I.D. everyone who looks under 35, but why didn’t I receive that same courtsey at Judy’s?
So that was that. Coming on the heels of my 29th birthday and a girl at work saying she thought I was much older than I was, not getting carded brought my youth to a crashing halt. I like to think that my wedding ring ages me, but it’s all down hill from here. Next stop Depends and prune juice.
For fun and to make myself feel even older here’s a list of things that were rare or practically non-existent throughout my college career:
Cell Phones
Only the showy douches had cell phones and I remember thinking how ridiculous it was when I saw kids talking on them while walking across campus.
High Speed Internet
Ethernet was being developed for dorm rooms but my college generation spans that strange time when people really didn’t go on-line that much. We surfed mainly for porn and to watch the Victoria’s Secret runway show, which is pretty much like porn. I got my first email address in college and we went to little cubicles to access email on 10 year-old computers. I got my first non “.EDU” email address after I graduated. I remember it vividly; I was in an internet café in Prague and I was more amazed by my Hotmail account than by the Astronomical Clock.
DVD Players
My roommate got a DVD player my junior year as a bonus for slaving away for a summer and a semester at a major pharmaceutical company. We thought it was the most amazing thing in the world. The one problem, the video stores only had 5 DVDs to rent.
Flat Screen TVs
Flat screens now adorn the walls of all the Amherst bars, but when I was in school they were mearly a pipe dream inspired by those Philips ads with that Gomez cover song “Got to admit it's getting better…”
iPods
I walked around campus my freshmen and sophomore year listening to Wu-Tang mixes on my Walkman.
