I want to tell you about this trip I was on over the weekend with 180 about-to-be-high-school-graduates.
They were the best behaved of any of the groups I've gone with, and this is the fifth time I've gone since 1995. They were never late for the bus, they all said thank you as I handed them tickets or lunch money getting off the bus, no one got hurt, no one got arrested. It was the easiest trip ever.
I got to hang out with my best Chum for five days straight, sharing bus rides and a hotel room. We spent our days walking around the amusement parks with the three other 50+ years old teachers in the group, and a good time was had by all.
So what is it that's left me with a feeling of ... unease?
I keep trying to put my finger on it. There was one weird half hour Saturday night when just one other teacher and I were trying to take attendance with the whole group at once, and although it was something of a disaster, and afterwards, an onlooker commented on how "disrespectful" they were, at the time, I was mostly amused by it. They just kept getting the giggles, that's all. It was late, they were tired, and they were very, very wet. Although I wanted it over with, it didn't bother me much while it was going on.
The kids on the trip, I might point out, were beautiful. We couldn't help but notice it again and again every day. Maybe their beauty is their youth, I don't know. I do find the extremely skinny girls disturbing somehow, as if they lack the qualities that make them women. But that's not it. They are fresh-looking, relaxed, untroubled, boys and girls both, regardless of size or shape or any other physical characteristic. They were all beautiful.
So when I heard the stories of how they had spent the previous weekend (just after the senior prom), I think it changed everything.
The kids did not tell me these stories, mind you. All the teachers knew them; so did I, for that matter, before we even started talking about it. They had spent the previous weekend at the shore, as they do after the prom every year, but this year, since it rained the whole time, they were almost exclusively indoors.
I knew there had been a lot of sex going on. What I didn't know is that it all goes on in a group setting, with your friends beside you doing what you're doing, just with somebody else, who might well be doing it with you in an hour, or in five minutes. Someone had overheard this conversation on a bus between two girls:
"Did you hook up with him last weekend?"
"I don't know."
Damn, that's gonna be some reunion in 25 years.
I am repulsed. Yes, Caligula, there is an orgy. It seems there is one going on somewhere, sometime, wherever teenagers gather.
Not all of them, of course. It doesn't have to be all of them. It just has to be any of them for it to be horrible.
It's not disrespect, I told someone who had been observing the kids as they prevented us from taking attendance. They would have to have a concept of respect first before it could be disrespect.
I'm sad. They were all so beautiful.
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I'm watching Seinfeld
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