Get Off Your Cell Phone

Last night after work I went to buy dinner, and found myself at the fish counter of a grocery store. Since they were on sale I got bay scallops, and then decided to buy a bit of shrimp. After I'd asked the fish guy for the shrimp, I kind of mumbled to myself, "I forgot to say please..." but he heard me talking and asked what I'd said. So I repeated it, and then restated my request with the please.

He laughed and told me it happens ALL the time (emphasis his, not mine), especially with people who are on their cell phones. After I had all my seafood and had thanked the fish guy for it, I stood there for a minute trying to figure out what else I needed before going to the cash registers. While thinking, I absentmindedly watched the couple next to me ask for their fish. They were younger than I was, but not on their phones. They didn't say please. The fish guy winked at me.

Phoebe Prince

So this girl in Massachusetts, a 15 year-old ninth grader, hung herself. Supposedly it was because of relentless bullying. I think we can all agree bullying is terrible. Wrong.

But what defines bullying? If you say anything that's mean is that bullying? So if a girl in the lunchroom asks if her outfit looks good and you say, "No, it makes you look like a fat cow," then have you just bullied her? Lots of people use the "but I was just being honest" stance as an excuse for being mean. If you bully someone, does that make you a bully? I really think all these questions need answers.

I bullied a girl in high school. For about a week. She did something trivially unfair to me, it flipped my rage switch, and I went on the attack. A teacher I liked pulled me aside and told me to cut it out and get ahold of myself. I felt ashamed, and stopped. The following year, after I'd graduated, I went back to the school to visit. The girl had changed, gotten tougher, marched right up and confronted me about what I'd done. I told her she was right, apologized to her sincerely, and she nodded, satisfied. Over a decade later she friended me on Facebook, and one night when she told me another classmate of ours had died in a car accident, I brought it up. Apologized again. She said she couldn't remember that happening. I don't know if she was lying or not, but either way she's clearly moved past it.

Honestly? If she'd killed herself over it, I never would have gotten over it. I remember everything - I remember friends' outfits from second grade, how your sister met her husband, everything. Luckily, she didn't kill herself. Luckily in the above instance, because I'd been bullied in the past, when I got called out on my actions felt guilty to know exactly how horribly I'd been making the girl feel.

An investigative reporter named Emily Bazelon has been writing for Slate about the Phoebe Prince suicide. She doesn't think Phoebe Prince was relentlessly bullied. Not by six kids. The district attorney is going after the six kids full force. Elizabeth Scheibel seems to have a history of being (what I think is) needlessly harsh on teenage defendants. If you know me, you know I'm pretty black and white on breaking the law. Unless you were literally saving a life, breaking the law is always wrong. That's how I feel. It's fair to get in trouble when you break the law. Elizabeth Scheibel seems to think you should get in more trouble than I do for breaking it though.

There's no question Phoebe Prince was what you might call "a troubled girl." She'd tried to commit suicide before, she was a cutter, etc. Girl had problems.

Several years ago, when I'd first moved to San Francisco, I was walking somewhere during my lunch hour when a homeless man made a rude comment to me about my body, the skirt I was wearing. Basically, he called me fat. To be honest I haven't worn a skirt since, so I can't say it didn't affect me. At the time, I don't think I told anyone, didn't cry, or do anything. Except never wear a skirt again. Adults are better at letting cruel comments roll off their backs than teenagers are.

As a kid I thought being an adult would be great, because adults were mature. They wouldn't bully or be cruel for the sake of hurting someone. Oh, how very wrong I was. I was shocked and so disappointed to find out that mean kids often just turn into mean adults.

It seems like at Phoebe's high school bullying was a bigger problem than at other schools. Is Phoebe responsible for all her own actions? Is the school responsible since she knew the kids who bullied her through school? People in this country like to blame. People like things to be somebody's fault. I think it's everyone's fault and nobody's fault, all at the same time. Is Phoebe responsible for deciding to kill herself? Not really, since she was mentally unstable. Are the kids who bullied her responsible for Phoebe killing herself? If you believe that if you aren't part of the solution then you're part of the problem, then yes, to some degree they are. Is the school responsible for not doing enough to protect Phoebe? Emily Bazelon seems to think so. So does Elizabeth Scheibel, the district attorney, which is why she went after the six kids so harshly.

The whole thing is a mess, and sad. Very little happened to the kids who bullied me in public school. Despite the fact that I graduated in 1994, it has stayed with me. I am hyper-aware of when I am not wanted somewhere. Nobody ever wanted to be associated with me in any way, and because of that to this day I am still hesitant to call anyone my friend, lest it embarrass them. Yes, I am a sensitive snowflake.

I definitely think bullying needs to be taken seriously in schools. At the same time, kids need to be reminded that high school is all bullshit. That they can and should move on from it, and I think kids should be encouraged to have a lot of things going on outside of school, in places where they are interacting with peers they get along with. Poor Phoebe Prince. And Poor Phoebe Prince's little sister, who not only has to deal with her parent's separation and moving to a different country, but now also has to deal with her big sister having killed herself.

Outta Twenty

In New York when you're in a store and paying for something, you can say to the cashier "out of five" or "out of twenty" or whatever, and while you're pulling out that five or twenty, they are getting your change. It's a time-saver, and there's nothing New Yorkers like more than that.

It drives me nuts that Californians do not seem to grasp this concept. If I say "out of ten" to them, they just stand there, waiting. So yesterday when the cashier starting pulling together my change as I dug that twenty out of my wallet, I got so excited that I did something completely out of the norm. I turned on the charm and chatted with the cashier. He confirmed that he is from Jersey, and made a joke about how Californians are a distrustful lot and that must be why they won't start making change until they've been handed the actual bill.

I've been the cashier. I know how the pressure feels when you look up and see a long line of people waiting for you. It just seems like good sense to never stop moving when ringing people up.

I would never make it in the South.

How Hard is Double-Checking?

I read the SFGate every day. Sometimes, if something big is going on, I read it twice a day. Know what else happens every day? I find a mistake. Sometimes it's a typo, but sometimes it's the wrong tense of a word, or a word that doesn't belong at all, or a grammatical error. Some days I even find two mistakes. Every day there is at least one.

I know nothing about the newspaper business. Or the writing business. But don't these people have editors? I took exactly one English class in college. Well, actually I took two. But I failed the first one. In the second one, I got a C. It would have been a B, but I handed in my final research paper late (minutes late, not days late, or even hours late) so my teacher refused to grade it, which knocked my grade down by a letter.

My point is, I'm no rocket scientist when it comes to writing. (Does that even make sense, or did I just make myself sound like Kelly Bensimon?) But if I'm finding one or two mistakes every single day, imagine how many more there must be that I'm missing. If the SFGate would like to hire me to edit, I would be happy to take the job.