the *what?*

This morning -- yesterday morning, by now -- my morning commute was enlivened by a posse of fourteen-year-old girls in from out of town. There were about ten of them, with three adults; really not bad, as school-group types go. And the kids weren't that noisy and rowdy (possibly, I'm sorry to say, because there were no boys among them, although I predict that a boys-only group would also be better-behaved than a co-ed one). What did make them annoying only made them slightly so, and isn't the point of the story anyway -- the point is that, one stop before mine, the two people in the seats in front of mine got off the train, as did the guy in the seat next to mine. I was on the outside, so I had to get up to let him out, and he followed the couple through the path cleared by the girls and off the train. I waited a moment to see if anyone -- any of the girls, or any of the other standing passengers -- wanted to take the inside seat, but when nobody did, I shrugged and sat down in the outside one. (My stop was, as I said, the next one, so sitting on the inside wouldn't have made a ton of sense.)

Two of the kids then took the two seats in front of mine, and a third sat herself down in the middle. The original two whined good-naturedly that it was too hot to sit three across, and they didn't quite fit besides, and sort of shrugged their friend out from in between them. She protested ("I've been standing the whole way!"), and the girl on the left nodded over her shoulder at me and said -- and I quote -- "Sit next to the lady. I'm sure she'd let you."

[blink.]

[blink.]

(Fox's Auto-Respond goes on at this point: "I'm getting off at the next stop, but if you'd like to sit on the inside, let me get out of your way ..." This is involuntary. Voluntary speech is temporarily disabled.)

[blink.]

The first time I can remember being called "the lady" by a stranger (and this is, obviously, not waiterspeak 'the lady' i.e. 'not the gentleman'), I was about seventeen and working at Baskin-Robbins, and the stranger was a young father with a very small child who was shy about ordering his own ice cream. The guy said "Go ahead. Tell the lady what you want." At the time, it was a little startling, but of course it sort of made sense -- at the age of seventeen, I was okay with a four-year-old considering me a "grown-up."

(I once babysat for a child who wanted to guess my age, and when she said "ten" and I said "no, higher" she said "thirty" and it was vaguely amusing that as far as she was concerned there was nothing in between. She was about five; "babies" were littler than she was, like her eighteen-month-old sister, and "big kids" were about ten, and "grown-ups" were about thirty -- probably about her parents' age -- and what else was there? [g])

But of course I've never really stopped labeling myself "kid." I was a high school kid and then a college kid and then a kid right out of college. It's been years, but I still have to remind myself that I'm no longer right out of school -- my brother is right out of school. And the new hires at work, the infants who haven't learned the ropes enough to take their own initiative and instead wait, like baby birds, for me (me!) to give them assignments -- they're right out of school.

This is the first time I've been so conscious of my seniority at work; there's a layer of management above me in my department, and my self-direction is pretty limited, which is okay and doesn't bother me. I've had temps all along, but temps come in because you have something you need them to do, so finding something for them to do is never a problem, and if it is, you thank them for helping out and send them back to their agency. But these new kids, who are only a few years younger than I am --

The thing is that my boss, the manager, is about ten years older than I am. About half a generation. And she's in this gig as a career, more or less, and is generally in a different place in her life than I am. We're all friendly (probably even friends -- we all went to her wedding), but she and the teammate who's about her age are distinctly one subset of our team, and the three of us in our early- to mid-twenties are distinctly another subset.

And it strikes me that the new kids probably perceive more of that sort of gap between themselves and me than I do. (Which leads to the idea that I probably perceive more of that sort of gap between myself and my boss than she does, but that's neither here nor there. At the moment. [g]) They might, god help me, even think of me as their boss. Holy shit. You know?

And to these fourteen-year-olds on the train, I am deferentially equivalent to any other adult. The train is full of commuters, some youngish, mainly middle-aged (it was late enough in rush hour that it was mainly folks with the clout to go in late if they damn well please -- I am not such a person, but my schedule's an hour later than the bulk of my department's and we have some whose schedules are an hour earlier), with the grey[ing] hair and the wedding rings and the briefcases and all that. I'm certainly not a high-schooler, thanks be to whatever god you name, but until this child called me "the lady" it hadn't hit me (in a while) that as far as a high-schooler is concerned, considering me an adult is not cause for even the slightest qualifying comment.

(I think I've mentioned this before. When I was in junior high and high school, I had teachers who were the age I am now. When I was in love with the camp counselor, he was younger than I am now, and he taught fourth grade for a living. Nobody in my peer group ought to be entrusted with the molding of nine-year-old minds. Good lord. [g])

For RavenD

Currently, I am enjoying words that dress up fancy. Exsanguinate is a good one (and I see it daily, in the Bindlestitch tag [g]). Defenestrate is another. I've always been a fan of combust.

This probably plays into my thoughts on the favorite-villains question, too; I like Javert in Les Miserables and Snape in Harry Potter and others of that stripe because they are (a) sympathetic from a particular angle -- they're antagonistic to the hero, but they're not bad -- and (b) because they're intelligent [and they know it]. To defenestrate someone, instead of just throwing him out a window, takes a level of boredom with everyday life (and the language used to describe it) that I find particularly appealing in a villain. It makes them so much more interesting. Anyone can be a hero -- sympathetic heroes are created, in fact, to be Everyman. Smart villains (antagonists through a lens) are characters, rather than types. [Cf. Tolstoy: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."]