What's age... it's just a number, right? Yeah...

(Title from "Beautiful Thing")

Unfortunately, it seems a lot of student don't agree.  I've had several responses from potential flatmates stating various (polite) versions of, "Sorry, you're too old."

Now, I do understand where some of this is coming from.  I'm twice the age of some undergrads; there's not only a potential "creepy old guy" aspect, but it's simply the case that my approach to life is going to be different.  If they're looking for party types or whatnot, then chances are, I'm not it.

But while I understand that, I don't agree with it.  I'm *not* like most 40-year-olds.  I'm not going to be anyone's dad or act like a parent in the house.  I've got my LEGOs and my computer and will probably be busy enough with my own crap that I won't have time to try and babysit anyone else.  I also don't look my age and certainly don't act parental anyway.

And that's not to mention how flatly illegal age discrimination in housing is, but frankly I'm not going there.

Anyway, it's been pretty frustrating.  I'm now focusing more on getting my own place in the village; I've found a management company that runs multiple properties in the area, including several studios that I can afford and are two blocks or less from campus (with parking).  I wrote the realtor this morning, so we'll see if I get a response back (if not, I'll probably call tomorrow afternoon).

But the whole ageism thing aggravates something I ran into at orientation on Monday (oh, yes, I'm officially a Bruin now).  While the group I was running around with were all engineers and were pretty nice, I felt definite walls from a couple of them that didn't seem to get thrown up against anyone else (there were 7 guys, 3 of us aerospace, one mechanical, and three electrical).

At PCC, I was the oldest guy in most of my classes (including the professors in a couple).  It wasn't really an issue.  Other than some friendly teasing with students and banter with the profs (usually about "the old days"), no one cared.  I actually made several friends who I hung out with at various points.

Even if it's just limited to socializing, I'm going to be annoyed if I get put into a box by my fellow students.  Oh, sure, I expect that I'll make "friends" in the sense of having people who want to work with me on projects and such (assuming I'm actually competent and doing well), but that's different from catching a movie or just goofing off on a weekend.  I frankly don't expect to want to socialize in most of the ways the students will, since I'm not a party guy anyway, but I was hoping to at least not be totally cut off from the social scene.

That hope is somewhat diminished at the moment.

Anyway, orientation was fairly fun, though less informative for me than probably for most people.  The school threw a couple of curve balls at me regarding my course credits: one good, in that I totally wasn't expecting to get credit for my Diff Eq class and they gave it to me.  The other two are classes I'm petitioning to count; one almost certainly will and may have just been left out because it's mostly redundant.  The other is more of a long shot, but it's worth trying.

However, the two schedules I'd gone in with were based around either taking the DE class I thought I'd need or taking an upper div class that had one of the others as a pre-req, so I had to improvise.  I'm still taking two engineering classes, but I'll also be taking one of my GE requirements (ancient civs).  I'm looking forward to it, but the schedule ended up being 8 am to 6 pm Tuesday and Thursday, with a long gap in the middle of the day.  So, no sleeping in for me.

But it does mean I'm officially able to do the two-days-at-the-office thing, so that's good.  I also had some conversations with both student and academic advisors, and they both assured me that the engineering school was *very* accommodating when it came to needing to make class schedules around work schedules.  They even said I'd almost certainly be granted entry into closed or wait-listed classes if needed (as long as it was reasonable).  So, that's pretty cool.

My mom also decided that the best way for her and my step-dad to give me money was for us to open a joint checking account; since I needed a new one anyway to extract money from my IRAs, we opened it Tuesday.  She's scheduled transfers to it 4 times a year at the start of the months when tuition will be due.  That's one less thing to worry about.

If I can just get housing sorted out, I'll be all set for the fall.