you do you, dude
part of my job as a social media person at a community college is to keep up with kids’ lingo these days. a couple years ago, it was nothing to see YOLO soaped on someone’s windshield, and we keep a running tally of how many times people tweet about ratchets. (for those of you who don’t know and unwilling to go to urban dictionary, a ratchet is a woman of ill repute.) (quite often, autocorrect will flip rctc to ratchet, which is really funny to rctc tweeters.)
the few months leading up to the new school year, i started seeing a lot of “you do you” – which pretty much means you keep on keeping on.
so charlie and i were sitting around one afternoon, and he said something along the lines of “i think i’m going to do XYZ later today.” and since i’d been entrenched in young-people lingo, i said “you do you, dude.” he thought it was the funniest thing and started laughing over the absurdity of the phrase. (when you think about it, it is an absurd phrase. but it makes sense.)
of course this morphed into a thing of late, with everything either one of us (and occasionally nate) vocalized taking part in responding with “you do you, dude.” depending on the situation and occasional word manipulation, it could take a different meaning, which really set him off (i’ll let you use your powers of deduction with that one).
so i’m glad that jane decided to tell god/gaya/earth mother/higher being the other day to “you do you, dude” and that it’s become charlie’s mantra. because he really did adhere to it and loved saying it. it was funny and fitting at the same time.
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i may have said it to him friday before nate and i left for menard’s in winona. he was waffling on whether or not to go up to the cities that night, and i probably said, “well, you do you, dude.”
i’ve been wondering if i had invited him to go to menard’s with nate and me if he would be sitting on my couch right now, ralf in his lap, maybe having a conversation about something where “you do you” would come up.
if wishes were horses. hindsight. all that.
you do you.