The Subway

Today, one of my friends celebrated his eighteenth birthday. I celebrated it with him, of course- a very normal celebration. A celebration involving close friends, a movie, dinner, and a few laughs. Not an extraordinarily well thought out or elaborate birthday; it lacked the grandeur and capitalistic-friendly airs of most American birthdays worth noting. It worked.
We did things that we have never done before. We ventured out of the comfortable Hollywood surroundings that we have grown accustomed to and rode on a subway whose existence I was not cognizant of before today. We PLANNED to spend time in the valley, that place full and empty of every kind of person imaginable, the place where visceral feelings on muggy summer nights are as common as drunks on Melrose Avenue after the local bar has Happy Hour. The astonishing thing is what we were greeted with coming out of the valley and back into our own comfort zone.
We were being followed by a pack of seven valley girls. Not the valley girls you are thinking of either. These were the worst kind: loud, whorish, obnoxious, likely inebriated. The exact kind of people that piss me off. And they did just that. They did it exquisitely, in such a fashion that no one has ever seemed to accomplish. They proceeded to sing "Happy Birthday" about ten trillion decibels above the acceptable level, seemingly to no one in particular. I would have hit a woman.
What got my attention was, several hours after this incident, how people responded. Or, rather, how they didn't respond. Were they in quiet contempt, like myself, or did they approve of this behavior? Such quizzical things people respond to. For example, if nothing had been happening and one of those girls had answered a call on her cellular device, dirty looks galore would have ensued. So why did these people say nothing?
Was it me or them?
"No", I thought. They were caught in between. They experienced two extremes tonight, oil and water. There was the outright celebration, and the private revolution going on inside of me. Perhaps this city life has just worn them down so far that they no longer care one way or another... no, they have embraced these minutiae into something else, something other-worldly, something no essay can ever hope to embody or convey with any competence... they found something that is uniquely this place that I call my home.