FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Broadly DK

My 14-Year-Old Cousin Taught Me How to Be a Cool Teen

My cousin is infinitely cooler than I am. Who better to teach me how to be a wavy teen?

I feel old. I'm looking down the barrel of 30 and I am now closer in age to Jason Sudeikis than I am to Jaden Smith. Part of me still thinks I should feel young—at least because I'm definitely not grown-up in the pension-and-stock-portfolio sense of the word. But I feel the cold skeletal hand of irrelevance on my aging shoulder all the time now. There are things I just don't understand now, like Lil Peep, and I just have to chalk it up to my ongoing decrepitude.

Advertisement

That doesn't mean I'm ready to go gently into that good night, though. So for Teen Week, I've enlisted the help of my 14-year-old cousin David to teach me how to be a Cool Teen.

David isn't just your average cool teen with over a thousand followers on Instagram. He goes to school with the daughter of a famous supermodel. Justin Bieber once played soccer on his school field. In contrast, the last time I was deemed cool by a cultural arbiter was back in 2009, when I was scouted as a model by the store manager of an American Apparel in Williamsburg (RIP). Once, David instagrammed a picture of himself holding a Supreme beach ball. Did you even know Supreme did beach balls? I didn't.

"First question," I DM him on Instagram. "Do you think I should go to work today?"

Read more on Broadly.