Courtenay Brown

1. Invite yourself along on a ride with the high schooler, his dad, and a friend, all of whom are good at riding their bikes in the dirt, especially compared to you.

2. Bring up the rear on this ride. Eventually the high schooler will call his dad from further along on the trail though, asking permission to please ride along the rest of the route by himself without stopping and waiting for you again.

3. Go to the high schooler’s family’s house for dinner.

4. Say that you think an all-Washoe-county-High-School Halloween Dance down in Reno “sounds awful” (which, hello, it does).

5. Point out the obvious truth that there aren’t many colleges in this country who pay mountain biking/cyclocross racing kids to go to their school (which there aren’t, and which puts a damper in the high schooler’s current life plan).

6. Look at your watch at 9 p.m. as you, the high schooler, and his family are huddled around the laptop watching ‘Top Gear’ clips on YouTube, consider the fact that the high schooler got out of school at 3 p.m., you got on your bikes at 3:30, you got off them close to 7, you then all showered and had dinner, now you are watching YouTube…

7. … so you ask, “when do you do your homework??”

Which effectively halts the evening’s fun for the high schooler.

I am very grateful I held my tongue about the high schooler’s fashion choices, that might have REALLY put me over the edge and into the realm of Terrible Grown-ups. I was DYING to ask about this whole zoot-suit T-shirt phenomenon, I mean do you just go buy a 4XL t-shirt or is it like a special ginormous t-shirt? And how come it’s inside out? Also what about the huge sweatpants? Are those like the “baggy sweatpants… reeboks with the straps…” from that song? But I kept quiet, figuring I’d done enough damage for one evening.