along the coast
A WHOLE LOT OF HUMANITY IN THE MORNING
The teen’s high school is on my way to the train so we walk a few blocks together. The rest of my commute is normally very introspective, solitary, and earbuds-and-reading-material intensive, with nary a word spoken until I get to my office and usually not even then. (Until about an hour in, when colleagues both near and distant start to realize they can ask me to solve their problems rather than making the slightest twitch toward self-sufficiency. Oh sorry do I sound bitter? START AGAIN.)
Today was very different! Near the train station, a kid headed toward (and wearing an ID from) the high school was zipping down the sidewalk on one of those weird skateboards with the bend in the middle. He was weaving all over the place and getting way too close to people on foot, and he then swerved right toward me, to the point where I had to step off into the parkway, so I said, calmly, “Careful.” The kid then spun around and yelled, “Fuck you, cunt!”
Which is QUITE the escalation!
I am not going to let that go, especially from a child, and especially when I did nothing wrong, so I also turned around and yelled, “Shut up and get your tiny dick to school!” I don’t know what happened after that. Hopefully he and his micropenis made it to class as it would be a shame to mess up your attendance record so early in the year.
After getting off the train I realized I had my very nice iced coffee cup with me but had forgotten to fill it with cold brew at home, so I stopped at one of the seventeen thousand Starbucks on the way to the office. There was a bit of a traffic jam at the coffee-additives bar and a lot of people seemed hell-bent on being FIRST to get to the half-and-half, but I had a pretty chill playlist going in my ears so just waited my turn.
A guy held the door for me on the way out and started talking about the scene inside, people just have no common courtesy, you know? Just say excuse me! What is the rush? We’re all trying to do the same thing and get on our way, sometimes you have to be patient! Normally my reaction would be ugh, why do we have to speak, but he was actually pretty pleasant and funny about it, so I pulled the earbuds out and we congenially bitched about the entitled rudeness of River North Starbucks customers for about half a block before parting ways.
So that was way more interaction than usual on a Thursday morning, plus way more trading of sexually charged insults than I ever expected, and now I am tired. No-Delete Thursday means you get all this plus (too much) more, without the benefit of reflection.
SIXTEEN GOING ON THREE AND A HALF
I realized that the very exasperating Big Questions from the teen (last entry) are just another way in which this age mimics toddlerhood. Toddlers are great at asking questions like “Why are apples?” and “Is five a lot?” Usually when you’re trying to parallel-park in the snow or something like that. Mom? Is five a lot? Um…it’s not a lot of M&Ms. It is a lot of severed heads. I realize all toddlers and all teens are different but in my case see also: increased need for sleep, dramatic expansion of palate/types of acceptable foods, more sophisticated sense of humor.
I have also come to learn that teenagers can take nothing, absolutely nothing, in stride. My kid is relatively drama-free and still, setbacks or everyday irritants get crabbed about. On the other hand, clearly no one ever really grows out of this behavior (may I direct the jury’s attention to Exhibit A: Twitter). I am far from the ideal practitioner of mindfulness but I find myself espousing its techniques on a weekly basis. My advice is just a drop in the fake-high-stakes bucket that modern teenagers are drowning in, though, with all these artificial SUCCESS DEADLINES like college admission, standardized tests, and deciding what to do with the rest of your life.
HERE IS WHERE I CONTRADICT ALL MY MINDFULNESS TALK BY LISTING EIGHT EXTREMELY MINOR THINGS THAT NONETHELESS BUG ME
- Books where you can somehow tell the author was simultaneously thinking of the screenplay/movie of the book
- Makeup: excessive use of facial highlighter, particularly way up past the cheekbones and onto the temples
- Referring to anything and everything as a “journey” and any negative emotion as being “devastated”
- The fact that there are so many Skarsgards—I’m not convinced that Big Skarsgard isn’t secretly adding a new one each year to see if we notice
- The media’s attention to UK politics: not to be rude but we are busy having our own constitutional crisis over here
- The media’s attention to new Apple products
- My stupidity whenever I entertain, and how I completely forget that guests are polite and will bring alcohol to a party; so I buy too much alcohol and then everyone brings alcohol and WOW, TOO MUCH ALCOHOL: MY HOUSE IS NOW A WINE STORE
- The fact that some popular thinking about mental illness has failed to acknowledge that you can be both mentally ill AND an asshole, and that mental illness is no excuse for poor behavior; I propose we work to #endthestigma but also #takenoshit
—hashtag mimi smartypants.