The Stuff on the Counter is Cupcake Batter

I seem to remember my grandmother (who raised me from eighth grade on) saying something to the effect of "Just wait until you have children!" I think she was trying to point out that I was going to have kids some day who would do to me exactly what I was doing to her. Whatever that was. Having been a perfect teenager, as far as I can remember, nothing really stands out and my grandmother died almost twenty years ago, so I can't ask.

But there it is, cupcake batter on the counter, remnants of yesterday's cupcake fest, beige and sticky and right there where you put your hand if you do anything over on that side. So much for cleaning up afterwards, I'm thinking, but I'm also wondering if this means that I left cupcake batter on the counter. Which is not really possible, since I didn't make cupcakes when I was a teenager, but I did make plenty of other things. (My dad liked to cook, so I suspect I started trying to cook at an early age to honor him. Or because I couldn't stand anyone else's cooking. It could go either way.)

Which brings to mind the girl at the concert last night. It was a night of tap dance and classical music, something that only Savion Glover does, as far as I know, and for this one teenage girl it was, apparently, brutal. And she wasn't content to keep that feeling to herself. She insisted on letting everyone around her know how miserable she was and when that wasn't sufficient she text-messaged every one of her friends to let them know. And they seem not to have cared, because she flipped her phone open every few seconds to check for messages. So she'd sigh, long and loud, and whisper to her mother in her best stage whisper "This sucks!" Which it did, for us at least.

Poor baby.

And the most fun part of all this was the bright light from her screen, the only bright light in an otherwise dark concert hall save for the lights on stage. A bright light stabbing your eyes in the middle of an incredible performance of tap dancing and classical music. (And jazz, for the latter portion, which the teenage girl interpreted as torture, something -- unbeknownst to her -- that the President was working feverishly to legalize.)

My wife, seated next to her, was the most upset. I was annoyed, but I had my wife -- and her program, which she used as a shield -- as a buffer. Still, there wasn't much I could do to console her afterwards except to leave her with this thought:

Someday, that teenage girl will have children of her own.