Choose Your Condiments Wisely

Spending a week with two teenage girls can be an enlightening experience in many ways.

"Let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up."

I use the terms "Weaksauce", "Awesomesauce" , and "Uber-Fail". The girls advised me that the correct terms, which of course I do not know because I am not 15, are "Lamesauce", "Cool Beans", and "Epic-Fail".

(Okay, Epic-Fail I know but I often forget "Epic" and grasp "Uber" out of my melon oblongata because, for some odd reason, it's easier for me to remember.)

I advised that my contemporary slang was derived from Jumping Percheron's Stacey, who is much more hip (and younger) than I am. The girls insisted that Stacey could not possible be more hip than they are. My defense of Stacey included the information that she is in the Air Force, lives in Hawaii, and is teaching her Percheron mare to jump. They still insisted that Stacey could not possibly be cooler than they, so I threw in that she collects and drives DSM cars (whatever those are) has a drivers license, and therefore her mother does not have to chauffer her around. They acquiesced, and I won that round. However, they still insist the correct terms are Lamesauce and Cool Beans.

While in Chicago The Kid and I were shown sign language by my little brother to indicate "over sharing" and "inappropriate comments."

They are called the TMI Turkey


















and Awkward Turtle.










We don't use too much non-ASL sign language here for fear of being mis-identified as Latin Kings or Bloods when in fact we are Crypts because we look best in blue, although we are also partial to the color purple.

Last week I modeled my pirate costume for The Kid, and asked how it looked;

SD: "So, do I look like a Pirate?"

The Kid: "No. You look gay."

SD:"So… I look like a gay pirate?"

The Kid:"No. Just gay."

SD:"But…these days it’s hip to look gay, right?"

The Kid:"Not.In.Your.Case."

I come from a generation where we used terms like Groovy (which I heard at least twice while camping from the teenage girls) Cool, and Far Out. Now, I dislike the term "Far Out" because some people use it over and over as a comment or response for everything and I just want to smack them. Wease, for example, was uttering the term continuously awhile back until I threatened to kill her in her sleep. Of course I would have to be a Ninja to sneak past the pack of dogs that sleep on her bed, but she stopped using it so the threat didn't have to be carried out. I once had a trainee who used it so much my eyes glazed over and I was trying to figure out which location to push him off the carriage would do the most amount of damage when he decided that he was just not cut out for a Carriage Driver's Life and "Went to use the john" forever.

I recently sent out a tweet (yes, I'm on Twitter) about a novella by Victoria Dahl titled "The Wicked West" and immediately got a response from an automated program that searches for tweets with the word "Wicked" in them and auto-responds with one of a select number of phrases. I found this almost as annoying as the "Far Out" trainee.

So, I propose that we officially make the terms "Weaksauce" and "Awesomesauce" because I refuse to be out-hipped by two 15 year old girls. No matter how phat they think they are.