As I cosy in with the community at large in crowded omnibus after crowded omnibus, I find myself doubting my desire to breed. And it's not the beleagured young working mother struggling with stroller, walking child and held child that serves as the cautionary tale (because I am pretty sure I will only be catching buses with future children for the novelty of it, and not necessity... famous last words!). It's today's teenagers of the Inner West that give me pause.
Funnily enough, i think that the type of teenager that I find most cringeworthy is the one most like myself at that age (possibly), and therefore, likely the kind of child I would raise. They are clever, they speak well, they are funny... but they are so TEENAGED.
For example, there was the short girl with unkempt mousey hair and bleeding thick black eyeliner, flirting outrageously with the tall good looking gent ('Santi') in blue v-neck school jumper (on a day with temperatures in the high twenties!). And then her sidekick. Gay. If not gay now, gay in the future. Beautiful boy with blond hair and sparkly blue eyes, but again... that too perfect accent, with everything clipped and clever, if not sardonic. He wasn't wearing shoes ('I never wear shoes'), and the trio just made me ... ewwww. From the conversation about the party in two weeks that 'Santi' should really give her the details about because she 'might' go, to the one about not knowing which bus route they were on and how they really should pay more attention to that sort of thing before they catch buses (insert pout here). All quirk quirk, sarky sarky, with thinly veiled ulterior motives (she wanted to stay on the bus longer because she knew 'Santi' was going beyond Newtown Station, and was attempting to justify it). It was all just 'seems' and not 'is', and it just looked so tiresome... and I just don't ever want to be the parent of one of them.
Oh, you know, my guess is not so much that you don't want to *parent* any of them as much as you don't want to *be* any of them. That just shows that you're young enough to remember when you were.. or could have been.. or thought you should have been. And that memory is painful.
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