My Daily Commute

 For the past few weeks, my attention’s repeatedly snarled on a series of no-doubt-well-intended ads against bullying. As far as I can decipher, the theme is “if your kid is happy and sociable at home but miserable at school, you might want to investigate why,” and I’m all for that, but someone at the ad agency phrases everything like the world’s flattest koan, and then there’s the one with a photo of a middle-school girl who “dreams of being a fashion designer. Her friends say her outfits are a nightmare,” and all I can think is why is this child attending school with bitchy 1950s socialites? 

“Darling, you look an absolute nightmare. Go home and change at once.”

I’m hardly the expert on What the Kids Are Calling Things These Days, but I’m pretty sure a tween who wanted to insult someone’s dress sense would be more likely to use a term like “basic.”

Anyway, the ads aren’t as bad as the late ‘nineties PSAs that made me want to take up smoking out of sheer spite — these ones don’t make me wish to bully any kids, but I do kind of want to find and glare at the copywriter.