Waiting for Godot and Gradumation

So in case you did not know this, faithful readers, when one applies to graduate schools there are timelines involved. First, one must plan to apply during the beginning of one's Senior year, with GRE scores in hand (preferably taken the previous summer or fall). Then there are the application deadlines, which are usually December 15 - January 15 sometime. This may depend on discipline. Then a waiting game commences. All the programs get a ton of applications which they then must weed through to come up with 10-15 people that they feel good about.

Unfortunately as y'all may have noticed the economy is in the toilet. This means that many people who would otherwise be working are going back to school, since there are fewer jobs to go 'round. In turn, this makes graduate admissions more competitive because more people are applying than would in a 'normal' year. To make things worse, because the economy crashed and burned, schools and programs are watching their budgets get cut to hell. Endowments, grants, donations, and other funding sources are shriveling up like a worm on a hot sidewalk. So in total, there are more people applying for an already very limited number of grad admissions slots for which there is less money than usual. It's not pretty folks.

I am caught in the middle of this politico-economic academic maelstrom. I have gotten rejected from several grad programs, put on a few waiting lists, and admitted to two. The jury is still out on one or two as well. Many programs expressed how many applicants they received and how underfunded they suddenly feel. They were very sorry not have more resources.

In my quest to escape wage-slavery I have elected to go to grad school, and eventually hope to become a professor. It seems like a good gig: I always wanted to teach, I love books, and always dreamed of authoring a few. It also seems fantastically better than my current lifestyle, which involves juggling 2 0r 3 part-time jobs, a full load of classes, and seemingly-endless days of hunger and exhaustion.

Right now one of my jobs is at a restaurant, a job I have held for four months and already fantasize about quitting. It may just be me, but I can't shake the perception that most of my co-workers in the restaurant industry are seriously fucked up. This is an observation informed by a decade of work on and off in said industry at numerous eateries and bars. I have hosted, cooked, washed dishes, waited tables, bused tables, and delivered food. In general it seems to me that restaurant workers tend to have substance abuse, mental health, financial, legal, relationship, and all kinds of other problems by the bucketful. I also believe that being ADD is probably a benefit in the industry because you have to do so many things at once. Personally I do not enjoy said disability, and therefore find it really stressful to have to constantly run around and do lotsa shit at the same time. It can be really nerve-wracking work. Everything is a crisis, and there is no getting around the fact that everyone generally wants everything at the same time - for this is the inherent nature of the dinner rush, which is what keeps us all in the black. And given that our national economy has been crumbling like stale Keebler cookies in a ziplock bag at the end of a long car trip, we are all grateful to be employed; restaurants have been shuttering their doors left and right.

The place I work at is fine dining, which can make for some interesting observations about class. Personally I never set foot in a fine dining establishment until I went to apply for this job, so I have learned a lot about the world of wealth while on the clock there. As an illustration in contrasts, when my working-class family wants to go out somewhere nice for a special occasion we hit up LaRosa's - the local Italian chain place. Plates run about $10 there. In comparison, entrees at the place I work are about $40. Dinner for 2 routinely runs about $150 with wine, appetizers, desserts, etc. And while these are mostly five-course meals I can't get over being surprised at how small those courses are. I have befriended the dishwasher, an older African American who converted to Islam and took the name Abdul whilst in prison a few decades ago, and we keep joking about how we never saw people pay so much for so little food and then not eat half of it. I am a server's assistant, S.A. (busser) so my job involves scraping plates clean and handing them to Abdul to get run through the dish washer. I am appalled by the amount of waste there is. Then again, most of these people probably do next to no physical labor so maybe they have no appetite and eating is just a ritual to affirm how rich they are. Somehow I always end up being friends with the dishwasher at restaurants, and he is almost always an old black man. He usually seems like the sanest person on staff to me, and the most removed from the crazy drama the industry is famous for. (Read Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential if you disbelieve me.) Abdul is a nice guy. He helped figure out what bus to catch to get home when my rusted VW died at work in December, so I give him a ride home sometimes. This saves him an hour in commute since it takes him 2 or 3 buses to get home across town late at night. I am pretty positive we are the only staff members who would ever stoop (or need) to use public transportation.

Like I said above, I never set foot in a fine dining place until I landed this job. I make minimum wage plus tips, roughly $80 a shift. I was therefore amazed to see several of my co-workers, a hostess and another S.A., come in and eat with their families. How could they afford this? I could barely afford Taco Bell on what I earn at this place. Then I realized that they simply came from money. To them this was just a little job to earn them some spending money, for clothes, bar tabs, and the like. I realized that they got their jobs in the restaurant not to attempt to make rent - as I did - but because it was familiar and easy. I reflected on this. My cousin worked at LaRosa's for similar reasons: it was something familiar she understood. It blew my mind that college students like me could be eating out in such swank places with their parents, much less not really need the money. In addition, if you grew up eating in places like this you would know how they work and what is expected. I was clueless in slightly intimidated when I started because I understood next to none of the etiquette. This is how social capital works, dear friends.

I spend a lot of time observing the guests, who from my perspective may as well be from another planet. I come from a town where the largest employer in the county was a Ford transmission plant (which recently closed) and the nicest restaurant around is probably Frisch's Big Boy (across the street from the feed mill.) Blue-collar is normal to me, and I have really only been exposed to the upper middle class and upper class via college and servile employment positions. I have two windows into the worlds of money and power: the ivory tower of higher education - often a pedigree show, and working for low pay as a 21st century manservant, or porter if you will. I do not know the rich very well personally but I have gleaned a great deal about their sense of reality from tending their children, parking their cars, waiting on their tables, carrying their luggage, and sitting in classrooms listening to their children. I am alternately intrigued and horrified.

As college students their offspring seem to be better educated and more confident than my class of students overall. They are also well-traveled. Their confidence can become a fault; they expect people to listen to their ideas, which they assume are valid and intelligent, and this can lead to arrogance. They sometimes have a sense of entitlement that I find bafflingly bizarre for someone so young. I was the first member of my family to own a passport or travel abroad, and also go to college. Because all of these experiences were new to me, I found myself grappling with manifold issues that my now-classmates may not be able to imagine. Not least among these is the overall intimidating nature of higher education when one does it with no family support, connections, or guidance. I heard a presentation at this year's midwest McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program conference about the "Imposter Syndrome" that first-generation and minority students may be afflicted with, in which they believe that they do not truly belong in the hallowed halls of academia and suffer from a sneaking suspicion that someone will figure them out and they will be shown the door. I can relate to that. My dad is terrified of my college campus. I took him to a lecture one evening and he was incessantly worried that we would get in trouble for being there since he was not a student or faculty member. It was hard to convince him that no one could tell, much less would they care. I got into a terrible fight once with an upper middle-class ex for suggesting that applying to Princeton would be a waste of time because "people like us don't go to Princeton". I don't know whether she was more enraged by the suggestion that Princeton was an elitist institution, or that we were on the wrong end of the spectrum to cut it there. I think mostly she was angry to be included in my sense of class inferiority. That kind of psychology runs deep. We love to mock the rich when they are impotent when their car breaks down or they can't fix a doorknob because we know deep down somewhere that they have power and money at their fingertips we can only imagine.

I am sometimes transfixed by the fashion sense of my restaurants patrons, who are overwhelmingly old, white, and rich. They wear suits to dinner, seem to love tweed, and the men always have these ugly - but expensive-as-hell looking - black loafers with a gold chain across the top. I realized last week that I had never seen this type of footwear before. Professional men do not wear such shoes to the office. I then realized that they were in fact intended to be casual wear, but still dressy enough to wear to a 'nice' restaurant. They look like they cost at least $100. And this is for shoes that are not comfortable, not for work, and only serve one function: to look slightly less fancy than regular dress shoes. That seems excessively fucked to me! The last pair of shoes I bought cost $4 at a thrift store and have lasted me for four years.

When I approach the tables at this joint to clear plates or pour water I try to listen on conversations. Several themes predominate: second homes and how much trouble they are to take care of, the kids'/grandkids' college and world travel plans, recent vacations abroad, investments, business world shop talk, and how much everyone hates Barrack Obama. (I smirk inwardly at that last one. My sister and my friends worked on his campaign and I ended up at an election-night victory celebration at the local watering hole with most of my neighborhood.) They also seem really excited about Facebook, which apparently just reached the over-sixty-and-we-have-more-money-than-we-know-what-to-do-with crowd.

It blows my mind that wearing a suit out to drop a few hundred on dinner with friends is normal to some people. My father never owned a suit until recently, and I had to teach him how to tie a tie when I was 13. Me and my friends could live for weeks on what it costs to eat a meal at my job.

The intricacies of class and culture are a never ending fascination to me. Americans want to believe we are all middle class, but our worlds are so very, very different.

So at long last I am approaching my final quarter as an undergraduate. I am set to finish this degree in June. It has been nearly a decade since I began this quest, and I can't believe I am actually approaching the light at the end of the tunnel. I have starved and strived and sacrificed for so long. I nearly died two years ago from the whole mess. Overall I know it has been good for me. I can live with a lot less than most Americans know is possible, and I have seen grinding urban poverty first-hand long enough to know how it works. That is an experience I believe to be important for what I want to do. And I am really proud of my education. I feel like I learned how to think on my own for the first time, and how to argue my ideas. College has transformed the way I see the world.

I have two acceptance offers, with stipends, from grad programs. This means next year I can finally just focus on being a student. I may even be able to live without sleep deprivation for the most part. And if all goes well in five years I will land a teaching job and be able to pay off some loans.

Thank the Lord.