ahead of the curve

I'm middle-aged and unhip in the bad way as opposed to unhip in the good way like moonboots on Napolean Dynomite. I unintentionally turned up a top 100 tunes/album/whatever the hell list when I was clicking around the web the other day and I kid you not, I did not even recognize ninety percent of the bands/artists/whoever the hell on the list. I exclusively wear comfortable shoes and we don't even have cable. But as I type, I just realized that regardless of my age, middle or otherwise, I have never been hip. A quick search of the memory banks and wildest thing I can come up with on the fly was the time I sneaked into the back door of a "The Knack" concert at the University of Hawaii student union when I was 19 because my surfer dude friends Howie and Lucas dared me and I didn't want to be left standing around like a loaf outside for a couple of hours. But I couldn't even enjoy dancing (there weren't any chairs, just the band on a short stage above a gym floor, obviously booked way before they had a number one hit) to My Sharona because I kept waiting for the tap on the shoulder and the bums rush out the front door when someone in a position of authority discovered our devious scheme. I'm so pathetic that way. And, really, age does have a lot to do with it too: I'm always the oldest parent at back to school or driving on field trips, always. And, yes it causes me no small amount of heartache that I am a dull reflection on my bright and energetic children. They did nothing to deserve being stuck with an old AND unhip mom but when you don't start building your family until your, late, ahem, thirties, someone has to pay the price.

So you can imagine my glee when my urban dictionary word of the day popped into my inbox:

Brick

High five, mini celebration, yay me. I turned my laptop into a brick and used the right word WEEKS ahead of discovering that I was using the freshest jargon, slang, argot, the lingua franca of the times, shall we say, to describe it. I'm hip, that's right I'm hip. Although using a term like lingua franca and admitting to being 19-years-old when I saw The Knack perform My Sharona at the height of the band's popularity probably just off-set my hip credits and now I'm back in the unhip column, brick or no brick, oops.