Kids These Days...

I've mentioned before that my work is roughly .75 miles from my house. While this is good and all, I must also mention that there are three school zones between here and there, two of them in an alternate route. Going straight on Hammocks Blvd. runs me dead into an elementary school, where parents picking up their children are under the impression that they have the right to stop in the middle of the road, thus eliminating any and all movement of other motorists. Passed that rests Hammocks Middle School, where I must break for acne-personified moving at the speed of erosion, AND their stone-still parents. No, thank you. I will by-pass the alternate route and take the conventional way home, which dumps me off behind Varela High. I turn into my subdivion just before the blinking yellow school zone light, so some may say this would be the best route to avoid back-ups.

Well they are wrong.

Know that at this time, all good little teenagers are skipping home from school. There are hundreds of them. Thousands. And they all think that everyone on 152nd Ave. is looking directly at them. These little punks do whatever it takes to catch attention. Some disregard the sidewalk made specifically for this purpose and utilize the street as their means of transportation.

Do they not see that I'm driving a Hummer?

The worst part is when I try to swing that right-hand turn into my subdivision. Those little jerks won't stop! They all just flow along, and the minute they see my beast of a vehicle, I SWEAR THEY START WALKING EVEN MORE SLOWLY.

LISTEN! COMMON SENSE TELLS YOU THAT WHEN A CAR IS COMING, YOU STOP OR RISK GETTING CLOBBERED! BUT THESE KIDS THINK THEY ARE QUEEN OF THE ASPHALT AND THEY CONTINUE STROLLING ALONG, JUST LOOKING AT ME AS I GIVE THEM DEATH-LOOKS AND ULTIMATELY CUT THEM OFF AND TURN IN ANYWAYS. And yes, I yelled that paragraph in it's entirety. Just like I do in my car. Daily.

One of these days, I'm going to just run them over. And you will know when this happens, because the story will be plastered all over the news that evening.

Warning: this next paragraph is riddled with cliches of the bitter and the old. Continue at your own risk.

We were not like that as teenagers. I swear they are waxing worse and worse. I don't understand why some of them (aka the punks) think they know everything, yet they still live with their parents, rarely have jobs, and have never paid a bill. They've never tasted responsibility or financial difficulty, yet manage to have all the answers.

That is the only proof to me that I am no longer a teenager, considering it seems like I just got out of high school a couple weeks ago. And I'm sure we had the same irritating tendencies - although surely not to this extent - yet I feel no different now than I did then.

I'm still rebellious. I still have the attention span of a fruit fly. I still need to be humored. Although those are all characteristics of a woman, as well...

Ok, ok, example. So I can't run on a treadmill unless I have something occupying my mind. I went to the gym a couple weeks ago clutching my ipod. I began running and wasn't five minutes into it when I had already skipped through my whole playlist. I found them boring and trite. So I looked up at the tv's suspended from the ceiling. One had basketball. Meh. One had baseball. Ugh. And one had politics. Kill myself. Six minutes down, twenty four to go. I started feeling short of breath. But I can generally run three miles without even sweating. Ok, ok, what could I possibly do for twenty-four more minutes to keep my mind off cardiovascular activity? I tried merely thinking about stuff, but I had nothing to think about. My mind, for once, was a blank page. I actually wanted to start crying. It took all my willpower not to scream out to the entire gym, "ANYBODY! GIVE ME SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT!" I finally just got off and jumped on an eliptical machine for the remaining 15 minutes. Wanted to kill myself on there, too.

High schoolers, do you do stuff like that? Well if not, enjoy the story. And can you please tell your peers to yield to oncoming traffic? Thanks. I really do like you guys. Oh, and also tell them not to do drugs. Now get off the computer and go study for your test.