29. Teenagers: The Squirrely Menace

There're two teenage boys sitting next to me in Villa Borghese, my usual writing haunt while the laundry goes round and round. The presence of these two lads is fortuitous, because otherwise I'd be at a bit of a loss as to what I'd write about this week. But their attitudes and their behavior, while not dangerous in and of themselves, put me in mind of a topic that Megan and I were talking about earlier this week and has come up from time to time before: teenagers, and how they're terrifying, and how that means we're old.

These two guys are sitting at the table next to me, facing each other, not saying much. After I had sat down and arranged all my stuff and after a minute or two had passed so-- I suppose-- he wouldn't seem too eager, one of them turned to me.

“Excuse-moi, monsieur, mais...hardle blarg furble saddle pop.” Or something like that. But as he spoke he held up a paper bag full of packs of cigarettes. He was trying to sell me...one? All of them? I looked at them for a moment while I figured out what he was trying to do, then said, “ Ah...non. Je n'ai pas besoin...” I didn't know what to say to finish that sentence. I have the greater part of present tense verb conjugations down. Sort of. Mostly. Not counting all the verbs that conjugate funkily. I mean, I've got avoir and etre (to have and to be, respectively) because those are super important. But anyway, general conjugation of verbs is not my problem. As far as that goes it's just vocabulary. Of course, as I write that I think I'm also almost completely wrong.

Then there's all the different demonstrative and indicative articles and adjectives and stuff. We're currently talking about them in French class, but I'm far from internalizing them. Whenever I say something I'm still translating it from English to French in my head before I speak, and I get mixed up when I try to remember if I should use les or des, or if ca or ce is correct...and the gender! La or le, ce or cette, ma/mon, ta/ton, sa/son...if you don't know the gender of what you're talking about then you don't which of these things to include, and that's after you've remembered...lots of stuff. It's like a whole new language.

Exactly what I'm talking about. And they're important. Not optional.
 And if only I could figure out how to insert them in Open Office...well, I might.

All of this logjams in my head before I even start formulating words. Or, if I just bulldoze ahead through the parts I already know, hoping my translating program will catch up in time...I pause, grasping around in the highly unorganized and incomplete French/English dictionary in my brain. Megan says she hates this look of pain I get on my face while I'm trying to speak. I hate it, too, now that I know about it. Time to 'port my poker face onto my French-talking face. I won't sound any better, but at least I won't look like I'm trying not to poo my pants.

Only marginally related, but look! Elmo pooping!

But back to those boys. I hadn't actually said, “No, I don't need any cigarettes” but I had said, “No, I don't need...” and the context was plain. So I wasn't going to buy their cigarettes. They went back to just sitting there. A couple minutes later one of them made the same offer to a table across from ours. They said no there, too.

For some reason I was reminded of that scene in The Big Lebowski when the Dude et al are sitting in the bowling alley with the cell phone, just letting it ring, not answering it, not talking. Periodically one of the boys scrolled through a list on his cell phone and called someone. None of the conversations went the way they wanted, judging by their reactions afterward.

They were waiting on something. Or someone. And why did they have a bag full of cigarettes they were trying to unload, presumably at discount prices (though we never got that far in our deliberations)? What were they up to?

This question is what I think drives the fear that folks get around teenagers. That and their always being in a group. What are they up to? They're twitchy, gems and gents. They're stuck in these gangly bodies with more energy than they know what to do with. It makes them loud and prone to running around.

Those are the two things that make them scary. People don't worry about the synaptic pruning going on, that their brain is actively decreasing the number of pathways it has at its disposal to make decisions with. They don't fret over teenage brains' thinner myelin sheathing, slowing down the rate of information transfer between the (still not fully connected) frontal lobes and impairing their ability to weigh consequences and foresee outcomes. People don't worry about their struggle to find a place for themselves, balancing between the care- and responsibility-free life of a child and the looming threat/promise of adulthood. And oh gods the hormones! There's no telling what those might make them do.

No. People fear teenagers because they are loud and tend to run suddenly.

A couple doors down from Petit Bateau is the equivalent of a junior and high school. During breaks between classes and for an hour and a half or so during lunch the street in front of the school fills to bursting with pods of teenagers. A pod is a group of two to...eight? Twelve? Who knows? These pods stand around on the sidewalk on either side of the street, perch on windowsills, and overflow out into the street. Sometimes it's impossible to get past them without actually (gently) shoving through the web of pods.

And they all smoke. I say this with very little exaggeration. At first it was shocking. When I was their age (and if you haven't been reading this whole thing in a crotchety old man voice you definitely should now), kids had the decency to sneak across the street into that church parking lot or go down to the end of the Old Science Building to smoke, and we did it furtively, always on the lookout for a teacher. (People that went to Grimsley High School know what I'm talking about. Well, if they were bad kids, I guess.)

Here the teachers stand in their own pod and smoke just a few steps away.

So these teenagers stand around, and they are loud. The girls shriek. The boys yell at the top of their lungs and abuse the girls. Seriously: noogies, kicks, purse-stealing, hair-mussing, all that stuff. It's obviously their version of flirting, and I see that kind of thing at the junior high I work at in Davis, but it seems meaner here. I remember that France is more overtly and less apologetically sexist than the US.

Besides being loud, they run suddenly. You never know, as you're trying to squeeze through them, when one will spin and sprint from one pod through the crowd or across the street to another pod or some other unexpected direction. But this cat-like taking-off-for-no-reason seizes them and they bolt, heedless of Others (Others being adults, cars coming down the street, telephone poles, or other teenagers not currently involved in whatever has them excited).

Us Old Ones, we're not like that. Groups of adults don't yell any more, unless it's at a sporting event or a protest or a wedding or at their kids. And we sure don't run places. Okay, some adults run because they're getting exercise or trying to win a medal or to keep the terrorists from winning or because they're Tom Cruise.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, you really owe it
 to yourself to click on this link right  here.

Yelling hurts your ears. Running hurts your knees. Kids don't know that yet. With little kids it's cute, although their shrieking has an uncanny icepick flavor when it jabs your eardrums. But with teenagers...they're almost adult-sized. They're almost adults. But they're still acting like kids. We're worried they're going to yell in our ears. We worry that they might run into us and shatter our fragile bones.

I also think we're jealous. We miss having that much energy spilling out of us all the time. Some definitions of jealousy talk about it as a kind of fear, a fear of being supplanted in affection or as being seen as less than someone else. And I think we all know where that road leads...

This is dang near Star Wars 101, folks. Know it. Totally on the test.

 In fact, I think I've put this on tests before.

At night, waiting on the metro, when a group of loud, raucous teenagers comes down onto the landing waving their arms and beer cans-- the drinking age is 18 here, as is the smoking age, but this seems to be largely unenforced in public-- it makes me nervous. See, while I know that the number of people attacked and eaten by packs of unmonitored drunken teenagers is small, you never know when your number's up and it's time to make way for the next generation by feeding their unholy hunger.

Teenagers are dangerous, ladies and gentlemen. They're loud. They run around and might knock you in front of a train. They might be talking about me when I walk by. How'm I to know? I mean, I walk by a pod, and they're talking, and shortly after I pass they all bust out laughing. Is that about me? Are they commenting on my hair? That I'm not wearing a scarf? That my French is bad (I didn't say anything to them, but I feel like I look like I speak bad French)?

We should have a place where we can put them, lock them up and keep them in one place where we can keep an eye on them. Maybe we could clear out the schools and keep them in there.

Back at Villa Borghese, I finished up my beer and headed off to put the laundry in the dryer. Those two boys were still there, morosely looking at their phones, waiting. They still hadn't sold any cigarettes. Whoever-it-was was going to be very unhappy with them. They might get yelled at.