I Am, Apparently, the Most Embarrassing Person Alive

I danced in my own living room. My daughter has requested I never do that again, anywhere, for the rest of my natural life.

It was a good song. I was making toast. There was, I would argue, a legal obligation to move a little. My daughter came in, stopped, and looked at me the way you'd look at a fox going through your bins.

Her brother filmed it, of course, because he is eleven and understands that the real currency in this house is leverage. The clip is nine seconds long. He has watched it, by his own estimate, two hundred times.

She asked me — genuinely, earnestly — to never do that again. Not in front of her friends. Not in front of the window. Not, I think she meant, in the general direction of the world.

Here's the part I wasn't expecting: two days later she played the same song in the kitchen, loudly, while I was in the next room. Once. Then turned it off when I appeared. That's a teenager saying "I love you" in the only dialect currently available.

So I'll keep dancing. Badly. In the kitchen. It's one of the last free forms of entertainment and she has thirty more years of being embarrassed by me to enjoy.