You don’t become cooler with age but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way to actually be cool. Call it the geezers paradox. ( author unknown )
Even as I enter geezerdom I’m still not in any way cool but I appreciate the idea behind this statement because as hard as it may be to believe, I used to be even less cool. Much less in fact.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. I was the funny smart aleck for a while, the popped collar preppy kid, the rocker with the mullet and jean jacket. I started smoking at 16, got a Yosemite Sam tattoo at 18 and was close to 30 before anyone ever out drank me. I was the life of the party, the guy you’d never introduce your sister to or trust to get you home on time.
Nowadays I’m the chubby guy in the Red Sox T shirt that talks too much about his kid, Marvel superheroes and Star Wars, in that order. I’m not admitting publicly that sometimes I wear socks with my sandals but I’m also not saying that I don’t.
My kid is cool. We’ve always been a bit indulgent in letting her dress herself, something that gave her a reputation as a ‘free spirit” from a young age. She wore a tie on St Patrick’s Day because she felt it warranted looking a little fancy and a bow tie to her band recital last week with absolutely zero cares about what anybody else might have thought. Scrolling through the archives here there were enough posts about the joys of just being you that I actually considered just scrapping this one. How many more times can I say the same thing?
The answer I think is that there are never too many times. You guys might get tired of reading about it but my daughter needs to keep hearing it I think. She was five years old when I first wrote about her outfits but she’s eleven now, heading into sixth grade, and things get a lot rougher from here. Her newly short hair, black boots and 90’s emo style already have people making fun of her and calling her various homophobic slurs.
What’s awesome, what I want her to keep, is that she simply doesn’t give a shit. She likes how she looks and is comfortable with herself. A quick look through her Pinterest shows that there is a definite style that she is interested in maintaining but as far as I can tell it doesn’t appear to be out of an effort to look cool. I see the other kids waiting in line to be picked up every afternoon. Very few of them look like she does.
As much as I want her to fit in, to be more popular than I ever was growing up, I think that it’s much more important to to make sure that she knows that she doesn’t need to try to be. That being herself is the only way to really be happy and that some people spend all of their lives trying to figure that out. I hate how fast she’s growing up but I want her to keep that geezer’s mindset.
Maybe without the sandals and socks combination though. One of us needs to look somewhat presentable in public.
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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com
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