those brats

Today, I had the misfortune of riding the bus and subway around Manhattan at 3pm. Kids were getting off school and planning their 4 day weekend. I guess I would have been jealous if I had a job and had to work throughout this week, but my weekend is longer than theirs: a whopping 5 days!

On the streets, high school girls were chatting amongst each other a bit too loudly about their relationships with their own respective boyfriends, which just left me a tad bit traumatized. It's one thing to listen to your friends' experimentation when you're 14, it's another thing to overhear 14 year old girls talking about their own experiences when you're 24. Though the experiences are pretty much the same, but me being so far removed from the mind of a 14 year old made me think "Oh gawd, what are kids doing these days? Do they not have any self-respect?" Which brings me to another question: do people become more hypocritical as they get older?

There's more to my rant about kids. I was shopping in two different mobile phone dealers. In one shop, a mother was selecting a phone and service for her 9-year old son, who was right beside her. He tells her that he doesn't just want any old phone; he wants a phone that has Wifi capabilities so that he can connect to the internet and that if he can't get such a phone, he'd rather not have a phone. Then he proceeded to go into tantrum mode in the store. This nonsense drove me away and I found myself in the second phone shop. There was a father and daughter pair. The girl kept invading my personal space; her head would hit my arms and her backpack would bump into my back. And all this time, the dad was looking at us but he said nothing to control the girl. 

I hate hate hate kids.

The rest of the day didn't go much better. I rode on an N train which took 1.5 hours to get to my home station. In addition to the train running extra slow, the car that I was in smelled like feet. But when I got home, I received something unexpected that made the day not so bad: my first handwritten thank you for shopping with us card. I didn't know these existed. Now I feel so important.