Miami Beach

SoBe's Interstate

Later in the afternoon we rode our bikes through Lummus Park, which runs from 5 Street to 15 Street -- a distance of less than two miles that you can cover by bike in about five minutes. Let's face it, SoBe isn't a place for cars. But if you have a bike (or blades or a board), this bike path is the SoBe Interstate. You can get from (almost) top to (almost) bottom in (almost) no time at all. I just wish they'd extend it a few blocks north to 21, to connect up with the boardwalk, and a few blocks south to the southern end.... That would be perfect!

This is a picture of Lummus Park and the bike path at night, when it gets kind of spooky:

A Tale of Three Teenies

What is it with teenagers these days, that they feel the only way to relate a conversation is to repeat it verbatim? You hear it all the time. There were three teenies on the beach, and this is an actual snippet of their conversation. There are no punctuation marks because she never paused:

"I was like 'Hi' and she was like 'Hi' and she was like 'Do you want to go to the movies?' and I was like 'No.'"

And you do hear this all the time. Standing in line in a Wendy's last weekend, I heard this:

"I was like just sitting there are he kissed me and just then she came up and said 'Like, leave my boyfriend alone!' and I'm like 'We didn't mean anything' and she's like 'Last weekend I saw you holding hands' I mean it's like she always just happens to see us at the wrong time!"

Yeah, I would say she does.

So why do teenagers talk like this? Naturally, I have a theory, or I wouldn't have brought it up. And I'm publishing my theory in this album because I formulated it while laying on the beach and listening to the Three Teenies. This is my theory: Teenagers talk like this because they're too lazy to analyze the conversation and extract it's substance (which, for the first example above would have gone something like this: "She asked me to go to the movies, but I said no"). An alternative to applying thought would have been to present it verbatim, but correctly punctuated: "I said, 'Hi.' She said, 'Hi.' She said, 'Do you want to go to the movies?' I said, 'No.'". But this sounds as lame as, well... as lame as it really is. So the teenagers resort to trying to spiff it up, to make it sound happening, and not, well, lame.

How lame.