A ride with the millennials

A ride with the millennials

There is nothing as frustrating as having to wait for a taxi and having to endure the long queue that comes with it. I have found that talking to the person next to me dilutes my frustration, just a bit. I like that I can interact with different people from all walks of life – even better if it’s a ‘misunderstood’ millennial like me.

The other day I rode with a group of vibrant, woke, young creative people. When they joined the Randburg taxi queue behind me, one of them complimented my outfit. I said thank you before I noticed we were wearing quite similar clothes. We all laughed and the millennial conversation took off.

They were a group of five, and loud and opinionated. One of them introduced himself with his name and pronouns. I did the same: “Oh, I am Itumeleng, I use female pronouns.” I said ‘oh’ because I was shook and happy. Happy because, finally, I had met people that actually used this method; people that actually understood that to assume another’s pronouns is wrong. We obviously discussed Pride month and unfortunately I did not get an invite to any Pride event happening in Joburg or Pretoria. I have never attended a Pride event and for a ‘woke’ person, this is a shame.

“What’s stressing you?” asked one of them as we boarded at the back seat of the taxi. I responded by saying that if I were to start, they would have to listen to my complaints until we got to Rosebank. I knew she was asking because of my recent acne breakout. “Align your chakras,” she suggested. I almost lost it because I have been trying to fix my third eye chakra with no success. I didn’t even bother explaining myself because there is no excuse for unbalanced chakras.

It was only a matter of time before the taxi driver reprimanded us for being too loud. I don’t know how they do it, it’s like they ask you nicely to tone it down a bit but trust me, you will feel attacked and intimidated and small. No one said a word after that. One suggested we open a WhatsApp group chat to finish off the conversation. I didn’t know which part of the conversation really because one topic expanded to many more topics, and I couldn’t even keep up.

Unfortunately, I had to get off. So no, I didn’t get to exchange numbers with them. However, I learnt a lot, but the one thing that stood out was that being woke is a thing – we must try by all means to know a little about a lot of things. It becomes easier to engage in conversations, whatever the topic is.

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