Embracing Dude
22:03 on Wednesday, July 20, 2005 • 8 responses
I’m approaching my six-year anniversary of moving to California. Given the new job and some new digs, it looks like it’ll probably be close to a decade-long tenure before I and the wife (and whatever other beings for which we become legally responsible) start looking to move elsewhere on the ol’ globe. I have mixed feelings about this; there are many things to like about (northern) California, but in no way do I consider it the pinnacle of civilization that its real estate prices would suggest. The fact that real estate prices in the Bay Area rose 22% last year evinces the kind of self-delusion a place which serves a tofu-everything can induce. It won’t be too long until the only people who can afford to live in the Bay Area are the CEOs of Apple, Oracle, Google, Adobe, Industrial Light & Magic, and Yahoo, all of whom will feast daily on a diet of ego and wheatgrass, and use the houses of regular schmucks like myself as mere parking sheds for their fleet of Segways.
Much has happened to me while in California throughout the last six years. I no longer check the “Single” box on forms asking for my marital status, for starters. My thoughts on a career in the academic humanities were whittled from idealism and passion down to cynicism and a kind of embarrassment for the whole profession. I drove a car and rode a couple of bikes. I gained a few pounds, started a little website called etherfarm, made and lost a few friends, developed an almost criminal affinity for Vietnamese food, and um, gained a few pounds.
Most surprising, though, is that in the last few months, I find the word “dude” causing hairline fractures in my anti-California-culture protective shield. There was a point in time when I preemptively asked people not to call me “dude” and when I wouldn’t respond to sentences beginning with, ending with, or containing “dude.” The first postcard I sent from Santa Cruz read something like this:
“Dude,
Dude. Dude? Dude!
-dude.”
I was using the term in jest, of course, but the sad truth is that in Santa Cruz, I’ve overheard whole conversations which consist almost entirely of the word “dude”. It’s said that eskimos have eleven words for snow. Similarly, there exist myriad inflections of the word “dude”, all of which apparently have a specific meaning and appropriate usage, none of which made sense to me until recently.
A month or so ago, I caught myself using the word “dude” without any irony whatsoever. It just rolled off my tongue without shame and without warning. Then about a week later I used the term “dude” in writing during an online chat with a colleague. The last two weeks of my linguistic activity have been peppered with “dude”. Just last week someone told me that they never thought they’d hear me say “dude”, and they told me as if they were proud of me, the way a parent might praise a child for speaking their first word.
Anyway, I think I’ve come to terms with dude. I can’t say it’ll make it into my lexicon as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition, and as a gerund, as it has for many other residents of California. I can say this, though: if the first word out of any future child of mine is “dude”, dude, that kid’s going straight to an orphanage.
