cutsies

So this morning, at around 8:50, I walked up to the front of Rhoade's Auditorium to ask our lecturer a question. A lot of people want to do this, but today there were only two other people in front of me. Well, only two people in front of me until two short yet somehow really attractive South Asian girls cut between me and the question askers. I was mildly put off. This "mild" put off-ense increased as their question proceeded to take some five minutes (we only have a ten minute break). Finally, they went back to their seats and I asked my question, which was spectacularly dumb and answered with little effort on the part of the professor.

I was further vexed when the next lecture hour began with the professor saying something like, "During the interim I was asked a good question that I would like to clarify..." I don't know exactly what he clarified. I was blacked out from bitterness.


So tonight, around 8:50 pm, I've collected my required groceries from Dominick's and proceed to make my way into a check out. I'm wearing my "drug rug" which cost all of $10 somewhere south of the mason-dixon line and I will later discover that my hair is very astray. But the contents of my shopping cart are excellent signifiers of my current status. Yes. A tub of coffee, three frozen personal pizzas, pasta, canned tuna, more pasta. Graduate Student. Anyway, I am probably two meters from jumping into the only check out line when a young girl whose acne smacks of foundation hops in front of me. True. She only has four or five contents, but I have to act awkward as I stand behind her and she wastes time by not putting her five contents on the conveyor belt while she idly looks at candy items. And the smell of her cheap perfume or expensive deodorant gets me thinking, How young is this person? That quickly leads to, How old does she think I am? 

Because it occurs to me then that barging your way in front of people seems fine when your younger. It's still rude, but it seems more... appropriate. Young people are full of life. That life expresses itself by not following appropriate social customs and being "rude." When you age, hopefully you start learning what you can and cannot do, which is why law enforcement rarely gets involved when seniors get into a scuffle. By knowing what's appropriate vs. inappropriate, one would hope that situations won't as surely devolve into fist fights. Older people learn how to use their words. I'm sure if I was twenty years older I would have garnered either respect from appearance alone or respect by voicing my opinions that "I was in line first."

But that seems so weak. So instead I just waited, feeling powerless as some awful smelling girl mis-communicated with the cashier a couple of times. Then I tried my best to be overly nice to the cashier, who was quite easy to understand.

Is it my time to give up my rights as a youth? Have I finally gotten so old that my life is no longer as "precious" as that of a child's? Is this the kind of treatment I should expect for the rest of my life? What's wrong with children these days that they no longer care for the lives of their elders?

And then I realized something: I still look and feel and act like I'm twenty-two. I'll have plenty of time to harp on teenagers when I'm eighty-six. For now, I'll just continue to hate being cut. Because one day, when I'm older, I won't accept it anymore. Then, with my hopefully non-arthritic, non-osteoporosis invaded limbs, I will smack bitches upside the head if they dare place themselves spatially in front of me.