I'm blogging on location today from Panera Bread in Westfield, the coffee shop where you have to drink your latte with a spoon. At least twice a day, my dad insists that I come here with my laptop because, quote, "There are other people your age at Panera's [sic], and you might meet someone." He has this attitude with just about anything, like he'll bother me in the middle of an online poker tournament or something with, "There's this poetry reading in town and there might be people your age there. You should go. You might meet someone." Or at Barnes & Noble, there's some lame author giving a reading — you never get the good writers in the bookstores out in the sticks; you get Sandra and Harry Choron, authors of the seminal Doglopedia — and there might be young people there who I can meet. Hell, he even tried this "you might meet people" crap when I had jury duty, like some hot, big-titted juror's gonna start fawning over me in the courthouse. Dad, that only happens on the Lifetime movie-of-the-week.

The thing is that Dad is really, really awful at judging people's ages, so he'll tell me that there's this jazz concert at a local nursing home but there might be Gen-Y'ers there. The sad thing is that it took me like twenty years to figure out that Dad didn't know what the hell he's talking about. He'd bring the whole family to the Scotch Plains patented boring-as-all-hell summer concert series, and we'd be sitting amongst the octogenarians in their lawn chairs and the new parents with their little kids all running around, and I'd think that this was what normal people did for entertainment in America. I guess that's the mark between a cool parent and a lame parent — the cool parents will admit that all the popular kids are at the events with booze.