Studies in Urban Primate Social Interactions

I had to stop by LASOTA for work yesterday, and I showed up right as school was getting out. I’m a thirty-six year old man, yet there is still a strange wave of self consciousness I feel when I try to go against the human tide of (pre)teens at a middle school. I feel flat out creepy at elementary schools, and I feel a more intense wave of self consciousness when I walk through high schools that spills over into a preemptive hostility. In middle school they are still kids, but they have learned a sense of what is cool. In high school they feel their sense of cool is razor sharp and if you don’t fit in, which I don’t as a guy dressed in slacks, dress shoes (ox blood), a button down oxford that is tucked in, and a belt that is threaded through the belt loops on my pants that match my shoes. I look good. Ask anyone over the age of twenty-five. Therein lays the problem. Teens have different cool criteria. The question is why do I feel the need to get my pride on in front of a bunch of knuckleheads drunk on puberty? I understand what is going on with elementary and high school kids. It’s all about hard core alpha male stuff. Humans are about half a chromosome away from being chimps. I feel creepy about the elementary school kids because they aren’t mine, and deep, deep inside my core that half a chromosome is stopping me from eating the children. Don’t blame me it’s primal. The female version is what stops women from feeding other people’s crying babies. With the high school kids, the males try to ridicule me because they think I’m after their women, which isn’t true – well, maybe a couple of cheerleaders. They see me as a threat. I feel uncomfortable because I am out of my element. The feeling slips into hostility because, once again at the primal level, we need to find out who is the dominant male. Middle schoolers are right in the middle. I don’t see them as little kids so I don’t want to eat them, but they’re not mature enough to be seen as threats so I don’t feel hostility. I think this is some pretty deep introspection and insight into the human condition. Do they give Nobel prizes in biology?

I’m sure you’re all asking, “Gosh, LJ is always talking about his mental filter. I don’t think it’s working, and if it is working, just what exactly is it catching?” What’s disturbing, even to me, is that the filter is working fine.