Young people

My Smaller Half and I went to a food and wine festival this afternoon.  I like these types of things because they give me a great pretext for strolling around eating lots of different types of meat in bread.  Today I ate a duck sausage in a baguette, a steak in a bun, and a chorizo on a stick.  Okay, the stick wasn't bread, and nor was the iced coffee, the calamari or the mushroom pasta but I was forced to put the chorizo on a stick in the meat in bread category due to a new mathematical theory that I have discovered.  Put simply:

lots ≥ 3

Brilliant, eh?  I call it the theory of minimally bounded multitudes.  It will revolutionize warfare.

Anyway, I'd been walking around for a while feeling really uncomfortable, as if a million voices cried out at once and were suddenly silenced.  It was creepy.  And eventually I figured out that it was because we were surrounded by freaks.  Everything about them was freaky.  Their clothes.  Their hair.  Their body shapes.  The way they spoke.  The way they moved.  These freaks are called "young people".

The reason I was freaked out by these so-called "young people" is because I am constantly surrounded by old people.  In my clinic all the doctors are older than me.  98% of the patients are much older than me.  And in the last month I have embarked on exactly two (2) social activities, both of which were almost exclusively attended by old people: a concert by the ACO, and the Adelaide Writers' Festival.  I don't think I've seen a person born after the Korean War since last year.

Here are some of the characteristics of young people that I discovered today while observing them with fresh eyes:

• the males all have freakishly muscular arms, like my legs but not as hairy,
• the females are all freakishly tall, like endocrine time-bombs,
• they are all freakishly dressed, looking like clones of two-bit dumbo celebrities,
• they all wear freaky looking sunglasses that aren't from the Cancer Council like mine are,
• they all seem to have freakishly high levels of disposable income to spend on booze and bad clothes,
• they all look freakishly young despite clearly being old enough to drink,
• they travel in freakishly large gangs, unlike me and my Smaller Half,
• they all speak freakishly loudly and also they all speak at the same time,
• none of them have walking frames.

These pimped-out, pumped-up, packs of pampered princes and princesses just blew my mind.  Have things really changed that much since I threw my life in the bin less than three years ago to seclude myself in the stygian solitude of study?

Am I now ... OLD????

I'll let the unruly mob decide - vote now in the new poll on the right →