Ephebiphobia- The fear of teenagers.
Latin, from Greek ephēbos, from epi- + hebe: youth, puberty.
The following is a true account.
APRIL 2013: ASTORIA PARK, QUEENS.
It’s one of the first nice days of the year and I take the day off from work to wander around my neighborhood on my bike; I need a day. It’s pushing 8 months at a miserable job, one I only took as a stopgap after being laid off from one I loved. I’m starting to feel trapped there. I find a nice hill right by the water and lie down in the grass, watching the water swirl around Hell Gate.
Some teens- brazen TRUANTS- are just on the other side of the hill, smoking weed. I look at the teens and they look back at me. One of teens says something and they all giggle, eye contact unwavering. They are probably right, whatever it is.
DECEMBER 2013: BARNARD COLLEGE, MANHATTAN.
The band that puts on my current favorite live music show on earth, Diarrhea Planet, is in town! They are playing a free show! Whoa!
It’s in the basement of Barnard College’s student union. Whoops!
I spend the whole show hiding in the back, arms frozen by my side. The teens are having a very nice time. Nobody seems to be drinking and they’re just happy to be there. They laugh and they sing and they dance around in a circle at one point like they are Celts and I’m stonehenge. Except nobody’s going to make a listening tour for my corpse.
JANUARY 2014: CHELSEA.
I have a new job, finally. I get to work on something creative, with my hands. I feel much better. The studio is next to a School of Visual Arts building. The building is a student gallery with big glass windows. My walk to work is lined with beautiful works of art. Every morning now, teens on a bench smoke cigarettes and look up from their phones at me. Hey, idiot. You should have done what you wanted and gone to art school. But I took some classes! Here, actually! After I figured out I wanted to draw comics instead of engineering? Yeah, night school. Creep.
FEBRUARY 2014: NEW JERSEY.
I am at a family function and a younger teen expresses her interest in science to me. Great! Something to actually talk about. I mention that Cosmos is going to be on the air soon, and the original was a pretty fun watch, I think it’s still on Netflix. Carl Sagan did it, you know, Carl Sagan? Who? Oh, right.
Time waits for nobody. Carl had a starship of the imagination, unbound by the laws of space and time. But Carl still died, and I’m going to die too.
Later, she tells me about a cool website to stream movies for free that I use constantly.
MARCH 2014: SOMEWHERE UNDER THE EAST RIVER.
I’m on my way to work and a teen elbows me in the face trying to take a selfie. Dang.
Tags: feeling old, humor, matt lubchansky, teens, the at-times imperceptible yet constant horrible pounding drumbeat of time, truish stories, whoops you are going to die!
DIRTBAGS!!!!!!!!!!
Shake harder, boy!!
Whenever two or more teenagers get in the subway car together I basically go:
At our last workplace summer BBQ I tried to talk to my coworker’s teen son about A Deepness in the Sky, which (lucky bugger) he was apparently reading for school. I would have read his reaction as contempt if there wasn’t so much blatant disinterest in the way.
But I was intimidated by teens even when I WAS a teen. Disappointed that I never took the opportunity to be a dirtbag.
I would have talked to you about A Deepness in the Sky! I am 32, though.
I felt like this even when I was a teen.
It’s the shrieking laughter. Nothing is that funny. Nothing.
I hated teenagers when I was a teen too! I knew we were all monsters.
I think everyone of all ages is scared of teens, especially other teens. What if other teens don’t pay attention to you? What if they all pay attention to you at once? Can your heart literally explode from the pressure of seeing your favorite dirtbag? I don’t know what everyone is laughing about but I better laugh even louder or it might turn out they are laughing at me.
usually the joke was me and the laughter was forced to make it very apparent how unwanted and ridiculous I was
Leave it to teens to weaponize expressions of joy.
“I think everyone of all ages is scared of teens, especially other teens”
I’ve been doing research on teenagers for four years now, and this is one of the most perfect things I have ever read about them.
This is not about this thread, but I am off to cornwall tomorrow VERY EARLY and will likely not be witnessed on the toast till next monday.
We’ll miss your comments, but safe journey nevertheless!
🙁
As a former WBAR DJ who spent plenty of time at those shows… trust me, they were drinking.
Also never forget that the student center is the Vagelos Center and Barnard women affectionately call it the vag.
the stage was also under a big oval hole
not to mention the fleshy pink color of the building in crepuscular light
crepuscular
Delighted to see the Toast’s unwavering commitment to dirtbag news coverage stands even in the Queen’s interregnum.
This is why I avoid the skate park at Astoria Park and Athens Triangle altogether.
I wasn’t even NEAR the skate park!!! I’m not welcome there.
There are YOUTHS hanging around by the Hell Gate?? No place is sacred anymore.
Go on, go on. I’m buying a bike soon, and I need to know where I will be safe from smirking teens. I don’t have to go all the way out to Flushing Meadows, do I?
Bike up and down the river and go to Socrates Park! Home of sculptures and free yoga and a nice greenmarket in the summer.
I usually find the north of Astoria Park past the Hell Gate to be relatively free of smirking teens, but not for Matt on that particular day, I guess.
“Come on, come on, piss off! I want to go to the shop. Need a poo, got to have loo paper. I should be able to just walk out of my own front door, what’s wrong with me? It’d be great if a car just ploughed into the lot of them, twisted broken bones.”
best tv show evuhhhh!
We are all Mark Corrigan.
unfortunately, yes.
The other day at the store I said “I’m doing excellent shopping” to myself, without a trace of irony.
I…actually think teens are pretty cool mostly? I mean I hated them (and obviously myself) when I was one, but now they seem kinda nifty. (This is undoubtedly a healthier tack than resenting them for all the fun I never got to have, which was a distinct possibility at the point in my early twenties when I realized being a grownup sucked except for the 24/7 license to ice cream)
I think they are 90% delightful, but that last 10% consists of, like, throwing their obnoxiousness forward into the universe. Which is why most of us Olds mostly fear/resent them.
Teenagers are just figuring out how to see the rest of the world around them; it will be a few years before they realize the world can see them back.
I actually really like teens too. I’m terrible with anyone 12 and under (especially like…7 and under) but once kids hit 13 I’m pretty good with them. I also have middle school and high school age cousins and they are way more fun than the cousins closer to my age* and we can hang out and watch pretty little liars together and complain about our parents.
*this may be because the cousins my age are busy with their babies, and as I mentioned, I am horrible with babies no matter how hard I try. In 13 years I’ll be the best babysitter to them though?
AS IF a teen could understand the incredible graphics and Sagan turtleneck in the original Cosmos!
True story: if you ignore (some) teenagers as if they don’t exist in the same dimension as you, they desperately want to talk to you about…stuff. Teen stuff. As a Lovecraftian nightmare deity I literally exist in another dimension from all human beings, so there’s nothing I can do about it. But it is pretty strange.
If, however, I try to talk to (some) teenagers in a regular friendly way, they stare at me with blank distaste, like I just manifested myself right in front of them as dorkily as possible.
Making sure to say SOME cause teenagers are not the Borg. YET.
I think “As a Lovecraftian nightmare deity…” should be the new “As a MOTHER…” 🙂
So basically teens are cats. The only way to attract them is to ignore them.
You might be on to something here. If I recall, most teenagers DO poop in boxes.
One of the best parenting descriptions I ever read compared children to cats and dogs. When they are young (say, zero to about 12 or 13, depending on the kid), they are dogs: they are super happy to see you, they want to go places with you, they depend on you and LOVE depending on you, they cuddle you. Then they hit adolescence, and they turn into cats: you are supremely uninteresting, or interesting ONLY insofar as you will give them things (food, mostly), you go to pet them like you used to pet them when they were dogs and they shy away, looking at you with a mixture of contempt and resentment. The “therefore” is that, if you treat your young children like well-loved dogs – lots of cuddles, playing, going places together, and love – and you treat your teens as cats – provide for their basic needs, ignore them largely, accept their grudging acts of affection as manna from heaven – then the teens will eventually turn back into dogs. Probably in their 20s.
This has been my mantra as my boys hit puberty (like a brick wall, at 40 mph): They’re cats, they’re cats, they’re cats. It seems to be working fairly well.
Thank you! My kids are 5 and 9 and very much dogs right now. I will have to remember your mantra when they hit their teens. Hopefully, by the time the second one becomes a teen, the first will be headed off to college.
That is an excellent plan. I was told by another mom (who has older kids, boys AND girls) that the boys mostly do one cat phase, but when they’re done, they’re done, and they go back reasonably soon to being dogs. Girls, on the other hand, may have several alternating dog and cat phases, lol. Truth to tell, I am adolescence-challenged myself (my honorary aunt says I went through puberty on a Tuesday night when I was 13, between 3 and 4 a.m., and everyone slept through it), so I am sneakily glad I have boys… and hoping they prove true to her prediction.
Teens are still scared of me at the minute. I make sure to nurture and augment this fear whenever possible. Except for my teenage toyboy, who was just sweet.
I know a lot of teens personally who I think are just swell and generally hilarious, BUT a certain amount of my job involves corralling huge groups of teens and it’s just… demoralizing. Often, when you speak directly to a teen, they give you this look as though you are speaking in a frequency their youthful ears just can not hear. But they can see your lips moving. WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM THEM. THEY ARE TEENS. TEEEEEEEEENS.
I like to think, when I see teens, that they are thinking “holy moly I can’t wait to get older and be as cool as her, with her self-possession and her cool-but-also-adult wardrobe and her ability to buy liquor any day of the week”. It’s completely delusional, but it works.
so, matt, are you gonna draw/ create an official teen dirtbag mascot for the toast or what? our mascot is a teen dirtbag, right?
love this. the toast is so fascinated by teens. as a teen myself I am 100% befuddled/vaguely gleeful about this
crepuscular
ASTORIA!
That is all.
So curious about all of you who live in Astoria now. Where do you hang out? Do I KNOW any of you?? Are we already friends???