Frankly, the high-school-age-or-just-past-it idiots who sat behind us made more of an impression on me. Among the conversational tidbits I couldn't, no matter how desperately I tried, fail to catch:
"And then he took like, one of those fire things, you know that you stir stuff around with? And he was totally poking at stuff with it!"
"Hahaha, yeah, and like this was my last final EVER, and it was all true false, and I totally just marked every single thing on it 'true.' It was crazy though, I still totally got a 32! I couldn't believe I did that good just marking everything true!" (The guy retold this story, word for word, at least four times.)
The thing that really killed me about this - besides, you know, being subjected to it for 20 minutes before the movie started - is that this was a group of five or six kids, all clean, all clearly middle class, all speaking with clear diction. And I'm wondering, how the fuck is it that we have a bottom rung of society that barely scrapes by - and these abysmally and willfully ignorant schmucks aren't perched on it? How on earth can somebody with that many environmental advantages and no obvious genetic defects manage to stay that stupid?
I don't know the answer. I wish I didn't even know the question.
