Emo evolution

Actually, I doubt the kidz even say "emo" anymore, but there it is.

This is something that has been on my mind for ten years, so bear with me.

I first noticed ca. 1999 (okay, nine years) the phenomenon of youngsters from about ten to 17 going around in nine-degree weather without coats.

I don't fathom it, and not in a stupid "those kids! They're going make themselves sick!" kind of way - I just don't see the point.

Sure, sure, it must get tiring to walk away from Halo or whatever to go meet your pot guy in the alley by Big Boy and have your mom barely look up from The Doctors to say "Wear a coat!" [or to have no parent home to badger you to wear one, if you can pardon the head-shaking sentimental tone]. This I can understand, even when it's 50 degrees.

But standing around in sleet (as I saw yesterday) in an Avenged Sevenfold tee shirt, as you are telling your shorter, younger peers how you would kill your gym teacher if you were a ninja, is STUPID. It's COLD, for Chrissakes. And that's like SPRING to these morons, seemingly. I see kids walking around in shirtsleeves at far more numbing temps.

Two things I don't get: 1.) current freshly acute economic woes aside, aren't all kids under twenty fully unaware of anything except voracious acquisition of label-brand crap? Therefore, aren't coats another way to milk mom and mom's husband for 280 bucks for some must-have puffer number? Why everything else, but not coats?

2.) I thought for a long time that maybe this was some sort of enhanced evolution going on, hand in hand with all this purported global warming you may have heard about. Like, all the hormones in the meats and dairy are causing the kids to be ready for a vast change, and the current batch of teenage no-hopers' kids, I mean the very next generation (already starting!), why, those newborn tots will actually have gills, or little slits in their sides which will become gills.
But that doesn't make any sense (!) for the reason that today's youth are seemingly more inured to COLD, as opposed to making any ground against excess heat.

So I don't know.