Crowds, unless I am pleasantly inebriated, give me hives. While I generally like to find the good sunshine-y side of most everyone I come across, being in massive groups of people causes me to spew nasty “I hate the world energy.” It’s quite hypocritical, I know, because I can be a big fat pain in the ass slipping in between people who arrived earlier than me, or chatting on my phone loudly at inopportune moments. (I am also the kind of person that threatens to ram pedestrians with my car if I’m driving or saunters slowly in front of inpatient drivers while I’m walking. But that’s a whole other can of worms.)
Somehow forgetting this little issue of mine, I agreed to brave the 200,000+ crowd of bead wearing, green adorned, celebrants at the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Denver. Of course it was only appropriate that I found a spot smack dab in front of a pair of raspy voiced older ladies who had something to say about anything and anyone that happened to pass by within a one mile radius of us. The highlight? A younger girl walks through the crowd to cross the street and the louder of the bunch obnoxiously says, “Oh honey, you really shouldn’t wear a sweater that tight.” Really? It took all I had to not wish that one of the bulls (yes bulls- not sure how that isn’t flagged as a safety hazard) passing by us in the parade would pummel her.
As I stood there seething about how irritatingly annoying complainers can be (again, yes, I’m quite hypocritical), I realized how crowds are breeding grounds for releasing anger in a passive aggressive manner. Case in point: the half head turn or obnoxious seat reclining normally practiced in movie theaters when a fellow patron is talking, chewing, or kicking our seat in a manner we don’t approve of. When we would really like to just tell someone to “shut the hell up or stop touching my seat god damn it” we attempt to annoy them in return or use body language to announce our disgust.
Let’s be honest- the vast majority of us resort to being mean before we will take the high road and simply ask politely for said offender to quiet down, move over, or stop doing any behavior that is affecting our own sense of enjoyment. It is, after all, far easier to go into a crowd of nameless people and expel negative energy then to endure the consequences of channeling it towards the people and situations that are actually causing it. Still, it’s just not nice.
As much as I don’t really enjoy elbow room only occasions or the people who come out to enjoy them, I couldn’t stand the self-entitled nastiness coming out of these two ladies mouths. In reality, their hatred towards everything even remotely pleasant going on around us made them look far more haggard and ugly then they really were. It was as if those string of comments were merely a testament to an entire lifetime of self-loathing and mediocre life experiences. And it made me say a little prayer that at that age I would learn to shrug off the little things and keep everything in a perspective that only living a full and happy life can give you.
Another (non-related) Plea:
While I am generally not the best at asking for help or assistance of any kind, I’m desperate. Really desperate. If you have yet to do so, please please please vote for my trips on Trazzler.com. All you have to do is sign up, and find user kayla 33. (After signing up you can retype the address to read http://www.trazzler.com/users/kayla33) Click save under each one that I have written (Dining with Drag Queens under the LGBT San Francisco contest is the most important) and that’s it. At this point EVERY SINGLE VOTE COUNTS!
And yes, I will be forever grateful. THANK YOU!
Confessions of a Perfectionist 