i'm so old

Last Thursday one of the girls at the shelter got in a fight at school and was suspended for two days. She actually was defending herself when another girl punched her, but because of the school's zero tolerance policy, she still got suspended. Today I accompanied she and her mother to a meeting at the school with one of the other girls involved in the fight and her mom. The assistant principal and the police officer that works in the district also attended the meeting. One other girl and her dad were supposed to be there but they didn't show up. Word on the street is that dad is too doped up to go anywhere.

What a nightmare of a meeting! The girls are 13 years old and waaaaaaay grown up. The other girl showed up in a very tight black t-shirt that had "bootylicious" written across her boobies in gold sparkly letters. Every other word out of her mouth was a swear word and her mother didn't mind. The assistant principal asked for her side of the story and next thing we knew the girls were screaming at each other across the table. It was really fun when neither the assistant principal nor the police officer did anything to stop them until the mothers were screaming at one another and there were threats from both the mothers and the 13 year old girls to beat the shit out of one another.

It actually turned out okay, with the girls finding out they actually had a lot more in common than any of us thought. And the mothers apologized to one another for yelling.

What made me feel really old was that when the girls were telling what happened, they talked about "mean muggin" and "grim". What? Huh?

I did feel a little bit better when I at least identified with the girls' dismay at the assistant principal's suggestion that telling on other girls that try to start shit will make the shit stop. I worried when at first the assistant principal was going to solve the fighting problem by making one of the girls switch all of her classes so she wouldn't be in the same area of the school as the other girl. But I felt better when she changed her mind.

Apparently correct usage is "I wasn't mean muggin." and "you was lookin grim at her." Yeah. Okay.