Titus Andronicus, Old People, etc.

Last night I went with some friends to see the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus. Once a long time ago someone told me that their Classics prof bitched someone out in class for saying "An-DRO-ni-cus", like everyone does in English, and was like, "Please, 'An-dro-NIGH-cus'!" I think the thing that gets me about Classics people is not that they're irrelevant, since most of the stuff being studied in the Humanities is -- a fact which I not only have nothing against, but I think is stupendous!; it's cool people read Renaissance lit and other stuff like that all day that no one gives a fuck about -- but rather that the Classics stuff has the *pretense* of being relevant, since Western civilization has a bad hangover from Homer and Cicero and Livy being used in the educational system all the years. Really, please, go fuck yourself, especially since "An-dro-NIGH-cus" is the Anglicized pronunciation of what should be something like "An-dro-NEE-cus".

Anyhow, during the play, I really had to go take a piss, and after when I went to the urinals, like three old men had gotten there first, and since all of them had kidney problems or prostate problems or urinary tract problems or whatever the fuck old guys have, they each took like six or seven minutes to use the urinals, and me and the other normal people in the bathroom had were just standing around waiting for them to give up and clear out. Honestly, nothing can piss me off like an old person who can't get a move on. The other day I was walking home and like about four old couples had come out of a restuarant en masse and were blocking up the entire sidewalk since they were standing there and talking obliviously and waiting for a car or two to come pick them up while pedestrians on both sides were waiting for them to clear out, and honestly, they were just pissing me off. The same goes for the old people who are usually ahead of me in grocery lines, who take five minutes to get their wallet out of their purse or back pocket to pay for the two pounds of food they're buying for the week -- if they had an ounce of consideration in them, they would have kind of gotten that shit ready ahead of time.

One of the things I've always liked about my mom is that she comes out and says that some of the most obliviously selfish people she knows are old ones, and the worst part is that they demand your respect. "Why should I respect them just because they're old?", my mom is always like, "They can go screw themselves, they should behave like other people and earn my respect," though, unlike with me, she usually gets set off by the fat women in Amigos who are aggressive drivers in the narrow Wal*Mart aisles and, unlike me, she retaliates by pretending not to notice and not moving unless they're like "Excuse me," at which point she coldly says "Oh!", as if only then noticing, and politely steps aside so they can pass. Sometimes later when she's ranting she says as a variation, too, "They can get off their fat ass and go screw themselves," which is a nice twist on her theme when she's particularly ticked.