Have you heard the one about the 56-year-old who went to grad school in London?
Most days, I don't feel like a joke. I worked nine years to get here, to my M.A. course in eighteenth-century studies at King's College London . Yet, more often than not, I am reminded that I am an oddball, a blip, a one-off on the sphere of age-appropriate academics plying their talents in these corridors. Take, for example, this bar I'm sitting in. I am taking these nachos home, in no small part because there is no one my age here to socialize with. Ironically, we were told today in class that the eighteenth century was a remarkably social one. And yet, I have been forced to be less social than I was back in my home country. Try hanging out with people young enough to be your children and you look like Woody Allen in any of his movies after 1980. Today, although I look nothing like my convenor on the programme, the museum docent told my group that she'd found our teacher and pointed to me. I am 5'9 and have brown hair. My teacher is about 5'4 with grey hair