Thursday, May 14, 2009

A Lesson in Adolescent Egocentrism

Barry learned about adolescent egocentrism in Developmental Psychology. We see examples all the time, living in a house with 1-1/2 adolescents (Britta is the half, we figure she's halfway done).

Tuesday night was the Fine Arts Awards Night at the high school, when the kids who participated in Band, Vocal, Speech and Drama were recognized. It's held in the cafeteria. Britta ditched us for a Disturbed concert in La Crosse (a ticket suddenly became available and she didn't even try to resist), Barry was at fire department
training, so it was just Master K, Lil Miss A and me. K immediately went and joined his friends at one table, and A and I sat down at a table with one of his classmates, C, and her parents. So it's C's parents, C, me, then Miss A, sitting around this round table.

After a few minutes, a friend of C walked over and said to C, "What are you doing sitting over here all alone?" Then she glanced at the rest of us and added, "...ish?" I busted out laughing. I said to C, "Did she just ask what you are doing here ALONE? Are we invisible or something?" I probably laughed too much about it, but it just cracked me up. To a teen, that's exactly what was going on. The diagram to the right is what I imagine the friend was seeing when she looked at our table.

Or maybe it was more like this:



Even funnier (to me) was when the evening ended and I told Master K about it on the car ride home, and he totally didn't see anything funny about it.

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