Thursday, October 26, 2006

Degeneracy Revisited

If there's one thing that makes me lose faith in humanity, it's people who can't open the back door of the bus. I've written about this before. Nothing makes me so angry as people who can't figure out that the back door to the bus works with motion sensors. If there are stairs, walk down the stairs, if there's a big hand drawing on the door you put your hand on it and magically the doors open and you can be free of the bus.

To this day there are still people who can't figure it out. They walk up to the door and just stand there helplessly. Then people wonder why bus drivers are so bitter. It must feel like some kind of horrible punishment to have to chauffeur the unworthy around town. All the obnoxious yelling, cell phone ringing and noise to bring someone to a place that couldn't possibly improve their life. I mean, if they can't open a door, where are they going? Really?

You'll notice that generally people who can't open the doors are slightly older so maybe the answer to life's problems lie in future generations. We can place our hopes on the children. Today I saw a bunch of bright students on the bus from the local high school. They were all dressed in uniforms, trying their best to make the uniforms look as slovenly as possible. One of the students, I'm guessing around 15 or 16 years old was sitting at the back and some of his friends showed up. He saw this as a chance to show off and suddenly became very loud. He decided to pick his friend's brain with this hypothetical scenario.

"Imagine you got a date with Jessica Alba... Somehow you managed to get a date with the hottest woman on earth. And you show up to her house, go into her bedroom and you find her lying in bed naked. But here's the catch... She had a heart attack 2 minutes ago... Do you still have sex with her?"

Yes, I'm sure you're just what Jessica Alba is looking for in a man (seriously though I hear she's pretty slutty). The other troglodytes began asking for details, how long has she been dead, when is someone considered officially dead. One of the kids explained that it takes 12 minutes for a body to be completely dead so he would probably try to finish with her before she was "actually dead". The elderly people on the bus were not pleased and the younger people were traumatized.

Anyway, the reason I called this post Degeneracy Revisited is because it is the name of one of the sections in the textbook. I'm supposed to teach the students about how the genetic code is degenerate meaning many genetic “words” can code for the same amino acid. I'm imagining all the students who read book after book, and spend years in school and still the world is in a pretty sorry state. And that's simply because there is no cure for stupid. These kids from the hight school in the area could spend the rest of their lives in school and they'd still be a bunch of cretins. They litter and speak profanely!! What if I end up TAing one of them??? It just bothers me to think of educated people who could shoot off some facts about science or commerce or economics. But they'd still be grotesque simpletons.

So I transferred buses and at one bus stop you could hear the pathetic cries of someone at the back. "MONSIEUR!!! MONSIEUR!!!" I turned to look at the bus driver. I've never seen so much venom as he muttered under his breath, "Mets ta main sur la porte petit *grumble grubmle*" And when I looked back I sawthe little kid from the other bus who asked us all to consider the deepest of philosophical questions, "Would you do Jessica Alba if she was dead?"

And with his vast battery of knowledge about forensics and god knows what else they learn in school, our degenerate necrophiliac was still unable to open the bus door.

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