Bus Stop
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
I kept telling people I was going to grad school, but didn’t exactly offer where. Once they inevitably asked, I’d make my embarrassed face and positively mumble: “USC.” Oh, how terrible USC is! Ask anyone who just got cut off by someone in a Beemer with USC plates. They will be happy to tell you! At length!
Except it turns out my program is awesome, and I love it so much I can’t even stand it, and I leave my house by 7:10 am to take my 550 express bus straight to campus, and I read my Jane Jacobs books for the fall term, which is still weeks away, on the bus, and during breaks, and at home at night, completely abandoning my friend the television, who has been there for me so faithfully all these terrible years, and I do all my homework so far ahead of time because I am so old, and when old people go back to school, they take it for serious.
Here, please have an example! When my mama went back at 40 or so to get her bachelor’s after two decades housewifin’, she got a paper back from her professor and was convinced her professor had it in for her and was out to get her and hated her soooo much to give her such a terrible grade, out of spite and vengeance, because she got a B-plus. That’s how serious old people are!
And so here is what Jane Jacobs says: that without cities agriculture never would have developed, because of how cities are way more bitchen at creating new work to add to old work, like how Ms. Ida Rosenthal went and invented the brassiere on top of (or under) her dressmaking work, I don’t know, she’s cool, you should look her up, and the most efficient cities will eventually stagnate and die because they’re too good at making just one thing, like the Indian dudes in Kerala I saw on No Reservations (TELEVISION!) making the best copper pots in the entire world for centuries in a row but they are poor now because once you’re too good at doing just one thing eventually someone else figures out how to do it for cheaper. Ask the Mancunians*! They were such hot shit with their mills and so forth, and now they all lie about the streets and knife each other drunkenly.
And what does a city do when it’s in decline? It makes bureaucratic make-work for its underemployed denizens, and that’s how you come up with rigid regulations that no one’s got the authority to suspend. They are all just like, “You are right! That is a terrible policy! I am so sorry that there’s nothing about it that I can do!”
Here is a for-instance. The Department of Children and Family Services gives aid to many family members who take in their grandchildren or their nieces or their brothers or what have you, when DCFS has removed that grandchild or niece or brother from its terrible parents. But somewhere in the bureaucracy, it was determined who was eligible for that aid, and they based it not on the need of the people taking care of the child, but the income of the parent from whom the child was removed. So you might have very wealthy grandparents getting $400 a month from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, because their daughter (the absent parent) is poor and gots no muneez. But then you might have a poor woman taking in a nephew, and she gets no $400 a month from AFDC, because the absent parent makes sooo much money but for whatever reason (Raging coke problem? Wire hangers?) was deemed unfit. That is not very sensible, to me! But some committee somewhere studied all hell out of it, and studied it some more, and that was what was Decided.
So I went to get my student bus pass yesterday, because of how I don’t want to pay USC $360 per semester for a parking pass, because that just seems excessive, and I had my forms and my school-official-signed admittance letter (NO PHOTOCOPIES!), and another that said the dates of attendance, and it showed that I am in school and will be for the next 10 months. And the dude at the window looked a long time, and hmmmmed that he thought the letters would be acceptable, but even though I am in school for the summer term, the summer term is not three months long, and so I do not qualify. But if I had been in school for three months the previous spring, I would qualify then. Also, they can’t take applications for the fall term, when I will be in school for the requisite three months, for another two days. And then they will send me my pass in the mail, 20 or so business days hence. So I will have to come back, and give my pieces of paper to him then, two days from now, when I will be in school (from 7:10 am on!), and so on.
Is this the greatest injustice in the history of bus passes? It is not even close to the greatest injustice in the history of bus passes! And once I get my bus pass, all y’all will be subsidizing my rambling ways to the tune of how I’ll only be paying $36 a month for my bus pass, and for that I am so grateful! Thank you, all of you and everyone! But still, it seemed sort of stupid and really didn’t make much sense, in fact I’d go so far as to call it really retarded, but somewhere, somewhy, a committee decided it, all in the name of efficiency.
*People from Manchester! I just really love saying “Mancunians”! Because of how I know what a Mancunian is!
rebecca@fourstory.org
Comments
Ann, you always have the nicest comments! Everyone else: step it up! Well, except Florence. She’s semper fi.
2010-08-16 by rebeccaWent back to grad school after retirement at 65, just to see if I could learn anything. I got so hooked, I stayed through my M.A. seven years later (how wonderful not to rush but to let it sink in and go with the flow). I went to a public university for the first time (after private schools for the original B.A. and M.A.). Best learning experience I ever had. Teachers at public universities learn how to teach, rather than read their drafts of soon-to-be-published papers to the classroom. OK, not all do, and not all private universities unload teaching assistants on their students. How about at USC?
2010-08-18 by JanuaryJanuary, I haven’t met a teaching assistant yet! But my program is very small (21 grad students in our department), and so we have the finest, most attentive teaching. In addition, I recently learned that USC’s average income for students is now lower than UCLA’s, and incoming students’ board scores are higher! Who would have guessed, right? That’s what a billion dollar endowment can do!
2010-08-18 by rebeccaDidn’t they give you grant money for going to grad school? They should have included a PARKING PASS (because you are smart and cute)!
2010-08-21 by LeslieLeslie, they should have ... except I LOVE THE BUS! Every single day I have some sort of awesome encounter with a kind person. I have been in my living room a really long time, and it is marvelous being out in the world.
2010-08-21 by rebeccaRebecca, I really think you pressed your luck enough graduating from New York University, which in addition to being a diploma mill, is located- well, you know where.
If USC is such a bitchen school, why is it located in the ghetto?
Huh?
UCLA isn’t in the ghetto.
You know, Rebecca, whatever. Its your life to take into your own hands just tryin to get to campus.
Your scintillating tenure at the University of California at Irvine, teaching journalism to young people, monkeys really, should have seen you clear. Woman, you need to be teaching the young Chex cereal mix of collegians, not mingling so much.
The Taliban makes a point when it disputes uppity women.
2010-09-1 by diegonomicsRobert, that was an awesome comment, good job! But just to clarify, I taught poli sci at UC Irvine, not journalism. Journalism is for losers.
2010-09-2 by rebeccaI stand corrected, though you may have taught in the poli sci department, wasn’t your course about big media scandals?
Sounds like journalism to me.
But what I really loved was your final- requiring it in the form of a haiku.
There’s a professor at SDSU who is supposed to be the thing, that thinks along those lines.
AND
Get this- There was a front page article in the UT touting some genius that invented a small CT scanner for the brain, (MIT is gushing over him) that wrote his doctoral thesis on a single sheet of paper.
Swear to Buddah.
Journalism is not for losers, but I appreciate your sardonic remark, and writing style. I’ve emulated it often. It’s just so.
Now then, USC is a fine university, but isn’t out of the frying pan and into the fire? What I mean is, if you can run the gauntlet to get there, aren’t you stuck in a hot bed of nascent Republican war mongers?
A vote for a Republican is a vote for war.
2010-09-2 by diegonomicsAnother thing, Rebecca, don’t you love how the privileged class- in this day and age, people with jobs, just lord it over you?
The Mexicans have a saying:
“That’s why we’re so screwed.”
Someone will tell someone else a stupid lie, or observe a complete lack of integrity, and someone else might observe
‘That’s why we’re so screwed.’
It’s just people who see it convenient for themselves, and the truth becomes a matter of convenience.
‘My job is based on telling you a straight up lie- so here it is.’
You know it, that person knows it, and yet, there you are.
Is that Shakespeare? Is that a quote from the Bible? No.
And in this job market, it’s not about actually doing what you say, it’s just about splitting the difference with your tongue, or telling a lie cheaper. That’s political science in 2010.
Okay, okay. Politicians amass money and pour it into thirty second spots that say nothing of substance, but inundate the potential voters mind. So thats telling a lie more expensively.
But the best lie, is the Republican lie. Send others to die or get maimed, wipe out a bunch of natives, make a tidy profit from it, then pound your chest and call yourself a patriot.
VOTE DEMOCRAT.
2010-09-3 by diegonomicsBuzo poetry:
Lyrics of Social Distortion’s ‘Story of my Life’
High school seemed like such a blur,
I didn’t have much interest in sports or school elections.
And in class I dreamed all day,
Of a rock ‘n’ roll weekend
And the girl in the front of the room,
So close yet so far y’know she never seemed to notice
That this silly schoolboy crush
Wasn’t just pretend.
Life goes by so fast
You only want to do what you think is right.
Close your eyes and then it’s past;
Story of my life
And I went down to my old neighborhood
The faces have all changed there’s no one left to talk to
And the pool hall I loved as a kid
Is now a Seven Eleven
I went downtown to look for a job
I had no training, no experience to speak of.
I looked at the holes in my jeans
And turned and headed back.
Life goes by so fast
You only want to do what you think is right.
Close your eyes and then it’s past;
Story of my life
Good times come and good times go,
I only wish the good times would last a little longer.
I think about the good times we had
And why they had to end.
So I sit at the edge of my bed
I strum my guitar and I sing an outlaw love song.
Thinkin’ ‘bout what you’re doin’ now
And when you’re comin’ back.
Life goes by so fast
You only want to do what you think is right.
Close your eyes and then it’s past;
Story of my life
Yes, old people at school. Major serious! Perfect illustration of “Education is wasted on the young.” (It actually does help that having some life experience under the belt assists when learning new stuff—helps with context. Best of luck on your new venture and contratulations!
2010-08-16 by Ann Calhoun