Coolness: A Monkeywrench in Genetic Theory

Now that I have Daniel, I know that I was never cool, in my entire life.  As a teenager, I thought I was cool.  Now I know the painful truth.

Daniel dresses as close to Grunge as a seven-year-old who has never heard of the genre could dress.  Daniel break-dances.  He showed me two new steps this morning.  Daniel has an expression, in public, that really captures something of James Dean, as Amy once pointed out.  And nothing is coincidental.

Each morning, I am Daniel's lady in waiting.  I enter the chamber, if I'm not already sleeping there, around 7:15, and I start to assemble a wardrobe for His Royal Highness.  I do this knowing that most, if not all, of the wardrobe will be rejected out of hand, once the Sovereign awakens.  Usually the underwear survives inspection, and sometimes also the socks.  But I can't remember the last time that both the pants and the shirt that I had selected for the wardrobe du jour actually made it onto His Majesty's person.  I don't know how someone so chronically anti-cool (a state of being beyond uncool, and almost beyond imagination) ended up in the employ of Himself, His Coolness.

Daniel has four kinds of pants:  army fatigues, sweat pants, jeans and residual Hanna Anderssen chino-type pants harking back to a time when Daniel had less influence over his own clothing selection.  I have this idea that boys should wear real pants to shirt, and a non-t-shirt, non-descriptive-shirt top - ideally button-down or failing that something a bit alligatorish.  So I favor the old Hanna Anderssen lineup;  Monday through Saturday, Daniel takes one look at them and says, "Daddy, no church clothes!"  I won't give him army fatigues to wear - don't want to encourage that "career" path at all  - and I think that if you're going to wear sweat pants to school, you may as well go in your pajamas.  So I now spend lots of time looking through laundry baskets for Daniel's jeans.  And the shirt is no different.  If I choose the Hanna Anderssen stripey special, he insists on another shirt, as he does for most of my selections.

Amy said something hilarious about this inexplicably hyper-cool son of two hopeless uncool parents:  she said that now that she has Daniel, she can finally understand how things look to cool people.

In this, she's a few steps ahead of me.