Saturday, March 03, 2007

Tonight's New Drama: "EO"

It's almost midterm week in a lot of schools around here, so let's have a quick quiz...

Imagine yourself in this scenario: You're at a mostly-empty restaurant with a three or four friends. Another friend comes in with someone you haven't met before, so you decide to approach them and make the introductions. Would you...

a) Find a nice isolated place in the restaurant to exchange pleasantries, away from other guests, or

b) Situate yourselves exactly in between two of the only occupied tables in the place, talking and laughing loudly as you completely invade the personal space of everyone at both tables. Continue this for nearly five minutes, appearing completely oblivious to the presence of anyone else in the restaurant.

Unfortunately for me and my buddy Coop, a group of high school (we're pretty sure) drill team (we think, since we heard half their conversation) girls did that to us tonight at dinner. I hadn't thought about the term "Estrogen Ocean" since the early years of this blog, when a few friends of mine described the English class they were taking in those terms, but tonight, we were drowning in it.

I'm not sure what the worst part was--the sheer volume of the conversation, the way they just commandeered all the space around us, or the fact that they were bragging about getting fake ID's, which must have made the one girl's aunt--evidently a drill team instructor--feel a bit awkward. (As I said, we heard way too much of the conversation.)

Finally, Coop leaned over to me and said, "We should start talking about quarter notes or something." We both laughed so loudly at that idea that the gaggle of girls actually noticed the presence of other people in the restaurant for seemingly the first time and actually moved to an emptier area. The EO was back at low tide again.

After they were out of earshot, I remarked to Coop that it reminded me of those commercials where people were always losing their jobs because they had NO! COMPUTER! SKILLS!, except in this case, the ladies of the EO had NO! SOCIAL! SKILLS!

So what is it that makes people act like that? Is it really a case of young people thinking that everything is all about them, or is it just typical drill-team behavior? At any rate, it was one of the more bizarre nights out to eat that I've had in recent memory.

Somebody get this guy a cell phone right away: A janitor in an upstate New York courthouse spent over two days without food, water or restroom access when he accidentally became locked in a secure room for an entire weekend.

You'd better not like fries with that: So what woud you eat after you've been without food all weekend? How about this--a Pennsylvania restaurant has created a 123-pound hamburger.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, I have never had issues with people and conversations until I moved here. Maybe it's a regional thing. None the less, it is incredibly annoying.

Kev said...

Shawn--I do get the feeling that we Southerners tend to need less personal space than people from other parts of the country, generally speaking (which is ironic, considering that here in Texas, we have so much more space to begin with). As for me, I don't care about personal space too much when it's my close friends involved, but when it comes to strangers, it's a whole different story.

Gary--thanks; that was the DMN article I was looking for but was too lazy to search for in the archives.