/dev/zero

Not as in I WAS antisocial, but as in I discovered how much I dislike people.
Now I don’t, as a general rule, have a problem with people. I’m a pretty gregarious kind of guy. However lately I’ve discovered how much I dislike groups of people. Groups in public places.

Hanging out with friends is all right. I enjoy going out to the movies with my friends, game night at friends houses, going out to dinner, etc. Churches are fine (without getting into religion or faith. That’s unrelated to my main theme here.)
It’s crowds, crowded places, places with lots of people, where most of them have nothing to do with each other, save for their physical presence at the same time and place. This is where people really annoy me. It’s the thoughtless acts, the “no one else here but me matters, so I don’t have to be polite”, that ticks me off.

I went out to a movie with , Nymaz, Amethyst and Kestrel. 20 minutes into the movie, something starts flashing in the theater. Not a blinking light, a flash. As in a flash photography. It does it more than once. I turn around and see some Paris Hilton look-alike sitting in the row behind us with some kind of camera phone taking pictures of herself and her young friend. A picture or two during a movie, while rude and annoying, I could live with. 6 or 7 pictures was too much. Finally I told her, loud enough for most of the theater to hear, to “Put the damn camera away!” She said something snide in return, but there were no more flashes and we were able to enjoy the rest of the movie in peace. I highly recommend Kung Fu Panda, by the way.

The next day, Kestrel and I, having new dress codes handed down by both our places of employment during the same week and neither of us possessing enough appropriate clothes, went shopping. The trip reaffirmed how much I hate malls. I used to be a bit of a mall rat as a kid. Junior high and high school, I hung out with friends at the mall. Don’t look at me like that. It was the ’80s. A mall, on a Saturday, in June, in Texas, is the last place you want to be. Too many teens doing the mall rat thing, too many familys with little kids running around. Too many people who have never heard of deoderant, or in some cases even soap. Too many people who like to walk 3, 4, 5 abreast, slowly, taking the entire width of a passage so you can’t get around them to where you’re going.

It’s the “me and my friends are the only thing that matters. Everyone else in this place with us aren’t part of our group so they don’t matter. Simple manners are unimportant. Being aware of other people around us, having any consideration for anyone else’s comfort or enjoyment is irrelevant.” that drives me crazy.

The people in the mall are just annoying and I can avoid that by simply not going to malls. I did it mostly successfully for about 5 years. Flash photography in a movie theater, DURING the feature? That’s a whole new level of “the world revolves around ME”.