29 8/12: The Son

There’s no rev­e­la­tion more star­tling than the fact that your dad is cool­er than you.

This is espe­cial­ly true of my own father, who isn’t just cool for an old guy, he’s cool peri­od. As a teenag­er, I remem­ber him wear­ing a leather bomber jack­et, and learn­ing to ride a pur­ple Kawasaki Ninja sport bike which he even­tu­al­ly trad­ed in for a sil­ver Porsche.

When I was even younger, my friends would tell me he looked like a secret agent. One time he came to help me move out of res­i­dence, and his jeans had wider cuffs than mine (and back then I loved wear­ing wide-leg khakis). I can’t remem­ber a time when he did­n’t wear some­thing by Lacoste, Polo, or Tommy, and even though he may dress far younger than his age, he can still pull it off.

Now he’s a man mov­ing clos­er to his 60s, dri­ving a Mercedes and a BMW, with what seems to have a coterie of women whose com­mon inter­est is him. He watch­es pop­u­lar movies, prac­tices singing, and dances on a reg­u­lar basis. Even my grand­ma once told me that peo­ple like him because he’s the fun one to be around.

Self portrait at 29 8/12

 

This is all very dif­fer­ent from me; a shy, intro­vert­ed, awk­ward per­son whose idea of a good time gen­er­al­ly involves being in front of a com­put­er.

Still, with all these dif­fer­ences, I know I’m his son. Just a chip off the old block, with the same work ethics, the same per­fec­tion­ist ten­den­cies, the same neu­rot­ic ten­den­cies.

We get grumpy when we’re hun­gry. We hate feel­ing sweaty and some­times have to show­er twice in a day. We make the same sil­ly jokes when we’re around new peo­ple. We dec­o­rat­ed our hous­es exclu­sive­ly with mod­ern, min­i­mal­ist fur­ni­ture before we knew what each oth­er’s hous­es looked like. And as I grow old­er, I’ve also start­ed devel­op­ing the same night owl habits, care­free atti­tude, insom­nia, and diges­tion prob­lems.

I turn 30 in four months, and I’m becom­ing my father’s son.

The Turning 30 Series

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