Under Pressure

Yesterday was full of unecessary drama. Not the kind that makes you want to shoot all the people you know, but the kind that makes you laugh and laugh at humanity and sometimes, your own stupidity.

R's younger brother was in town over the weekend for a party. While R did supervising-type stuff (regulating who got in and out), his younger brother amused himself by grabbing and grinding all over girls on the dance floor. Now, this is fine, but you have to understand:

He goes to a state university. At their parties, this is a perfectly normal way to introduce oneself. Case girls are usually a little more withdrawing--they like a little buffer time before the pelvises start hitting.

One of those girls was me--which is all well and good, I'll dance with him if he's bored, and he's a sweetie and a good dancer, but, um....not quite that grabby, thank you.

So the first bit of drama was a conversation between R and his brother, saying "hey, um...you did know that was my girlfriend's ass you were grabbing, right?" and the reply: "Oh, I thought I was pretty innocent with her." No harm, no foul.

During the afternoon, the fraternity brothers resumed their project of repainting the house, this time in the stairwell. One of the brothers got dizzy, said he'd just had an allergy shot and wanted to go lie down. Twenty minutes later, he was nowhere to be found. A search mounted, every room in the house was checked, his cell phone was in his room unattended, tensions were beginning to escalate--and then it turned out he'd gone out to dinner with another brother.

Yesterday evening R and I went to the Indians game. We left in the middle of the seventh inning, due to disgust at a) the Tribe and b) the drunken people surrounding us. To avoid the parking hassle, we'd taken the RTA (supporting Cleveland public transportation is always a good idea) but on the way home, we ran into some trouble. The train in front of us broke down, and we were stopped for about twenty minutes. No problem, right? Just sit there, chill a bit, and wait for the train to get going again, since there's nothing we can really do about it.

Some of our fellow passengers did not share our opinion. Two girls of probably about twelve or fourteen began setting up an unholy clamor as soon as the train stopped. There was shouting into cell phones. There was a ton of harassing the driver--who couldn't do a damn thing about it. There were many, many repititions of "OH MY FUCKING GOD/I'm gwine to have an episode, I am/This is how it always starts in the movies, we could be on here with a crazyperson" and other bits of pubescent girl wit.

Now, is it wrong to have laughed when one of these girls called her friend's house: "Girl, put your momma on the phone, it's amergency, for real! I'm not kidding, I gotta get out of here!" It was so obviously drama for drama's sake, and watching it happen and thinking about myself at that age and the high horse I would have gotten on made me laugh.