(no subject)
oogh. kind of a late night tonight, and now I'm all awake and can't seem to sleep, which is bad, considering that I'm back at work in, oh... six hours.
The ride home tonight featured a packed bus and an interesting conversation with a high school girl from Tacoma who was trying to get to Aurora with a couple of her friends. They were on the wrong one, obviously, and what started as my attempts (successful, I think) to point them in the right direction ended up moving on to being rude as a means of social assertion and survival, dealing with police harassment, violence, drinking and smoking at the age of eleven, and so many similar qualities. It was almost comical considering how different we looked; me in a suit and her in a bubble jacket, huge earrings, etc., but that made it all the more striking, and I realized about a third of the way into it that I had no business trying to speak about such things with any authority. The closest I've come to gang violence is seeing fights at school and driving past a beating, then speeding away when a gun was pointed at me. I'll never know what it's like to be stopped by police for walking at 1:30 am. I've evolved into a "nice guy" (she said so herself) who doesn't understand the concept of being insulted by petty remarks, at least not enough to start shit over it.
It's the kind of thing that we the privileged all seem to realize but rarely confront. They got off at my stop, I told them where to catch the 44 and then the 358, and gave her my umbrella. I never asked her name.
And I seriously doubt I'll ever see her again, have any interest in what goes on in her life, or even remember her in a year, if that long. It's kind of sad to think that.
Anyway, time to try to sleep now and zone out all the interesting, important stuff so that I can focus on the frivolity of going to work tomorrow morning.
The ride home tonight featured a packed bus and an interesting conversation with a high school girl from Tacoma who was trying to get to Aurora with a couple of her friends. They were on the wrong one, obviously, and what started as my attempts (successful, I think) to point them in the right direction ended up moving on to being rude as a means of social assertion and survival, dealing with police harassment, violence, drinking and smoking at the age of eleven, and so many similar qualities. It was almost comical considering how different we looked; me in a suit and her in a bubble jacket, huge earrings, etc., but that made it all the more striking, and I realized about a third of the way into it that I had no business trying to speak about such things with any authority. The closest I've come to gang violence is seeing fights at school and driving past a beating, then speeding away when a gun was pointed at me. I'll never know what it's like to be stopped by police for walking at 1:30 am. I've evolved into a "nice guy" (she said so herself) who doesn't understand the concept of being insulted by petty remarks, at least not enough to start shit over it.
It's the kind of thing that we the privileged all seem to realize but rarely confront. They got off at my stop, I told them where to catch the 44 and then the 358, and gave her my umbrella. I never asked her name.
And I seriously doubt I'll ever see her again, have any interest in what goes on in her life, or even remember her in a year, if that long. It's kind of sad to think that.
Anyway, time to try to sleep now and zone out all the interesting, important stuff so that I can focus on the frivolity of going to work tomorrow morning.