Jeff's Spleen

Coolio Maximo!

My daughter is 10 years old now. That means I'm rapidly moving out of the phase of being adored and even more rapidly moving into the phase of being A Total And Complete Embarrassment. Especially when around her friends. No, I suppose it doesn't help that I am often singing loudly, off-pitch, in a falsetto, to Bachman-Turner Overdrive songs. But still.

This morning, when her carpool came to pick her up for school, she said, rather pointedly, "BYE, Dad," before we had even walked all the way down the driveway, making it clear that I was not to go all the way to the car with her, where I might say something embarrassing in front of her friends, something like, "Did you remember to wipe your butt this morning, honey?" Which is what my mom did to me for my first 20 years, which is why I'm still in therapy three times a week.

Anyway, lately she's been coming home from school with all sorts of new expressions. Thankfully, those expressions are not yet things like "fuck you", but are more like the title of today's blog entry. The opposite of "coolio maximo", by the way, is "coolio minimo", for something only sort of cool. For example, me buying her the School of Rock DVD yesterday was "coolio maximo." I'm actually not sure what qualifies as "coolio minimo." Me not letting her watch the whole DVD after dinner was not "coolio minimo." It was more like "fucked up Nazi bullshit." Nah, just kidding. She didn't really say that. At least not to my face.