Passive aggressive?

Sometimes direct confrontation is not the answer. In certain situations direct confrontation may possibly make the situation worse. That’s just my opinion and the conclusion I came to yesterday regarding teenagers hanging out.
It’s Summer so the kids on the block and their friends are all hanging out, running up and down the sidewalk like chickens with their heads cut off. These aren’t wide houses so bands of kids can randomly wind up in front of your house screaming at each other, loudly gossiping, hitting, flirting, boasting, and carrying on. I want them to move on. Directly, asking a band of kids, particularly when they are bragging about how tough they are, to move, maybe not a good idea. So instead I sat on my stoop and read the paper. If I were really annoyed, and wanted them gone quicker, I’d water the treebox or weed the treebox (which would involve fistfulls of dirt flying all over).
Kids will be kids and I’m not exactly at the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ state of mind, yet, but I’ll be glad when school starts up.

6 thoughts on “Passive aggressive?”

  1. Well, there are different ways to be passive-aggressive. My neighbor ‘hints’ that I need to weed by weeding himself, then placing the weeded plants in an obvious location. This enrages me and only makes me resent him and want to do more things to irritate him. But that’s just me.

    Sitting on your stoop doesn’t hurt anyone and might send a message, but then again, they might not even notice you, unless you’ve got a practiced and effective glare. I developed my child-withering glare when I was a camp counselor, and it worked on gypsy kids when I was in Central Asia, but may not work on DC kids.

  2. I call it the librarian/2nd grade teacher look. It’s more librarian because well I went to library school and sometimes, to my shame, there’s shusshing. The look requires glasses and a nose for the glasses to slide down. Tilt head just so, raise eyebrow, and look exceeding judgemental. Then lift nose, turn head, let go a sigh (or tsk-tsk) and go back to doing what you were doing. This must be backed by regular maintenance of addressing children when you pass by them of addressing them as children (“good afternoon children/kids”)or a simple hello.

  3. Now that I know librarians have consciously practiced that ‘look’, a lot of things are explained for me now.

  4. you could wash your car on the street.

    you could taser them (joke)

    you could ask them politely to keep the noise down because you have a real bad headache.

    you could tell them that the ice cream man is supposed to show up three blocks away.

    you could light a stink bomb (nowadays, they are liquid and don’t smoke) and toss it in their general direction.

    you could ask them to help you find a black and white cat that you lost on the other side of town.

    i dunno….

    or you could sit on the stoop. :o)

  6. “[Y]ou could ask them politely to keep the noise down because you have a real bad headache.”

    Polite does not work with these kids. As many times as I’ve dealt with bad kids, they do a double-take, then start giggling and mocking.

    I agree with Mike…these kids have no respect and simply don’t care. I blame the parents, because the parents don’t care either.

    Today on the train two teenage girls sat behind me giggling and bragging about teaching a baby how to curse. I turned my head around and gave the most evil sneer…but they didn’t care and carried on.

Comments are closed.