it'll be awesome, man

As the youngest of four, I always appreciated that there were sibling sentries who would return from the front lines of adolescence and report back. Between birth order, being a Quaker, and being raised on a college campus, the language of the 60s came to me earlier than to most of my peers. I began to say "man" and "cool," for example, from about the age of 6, when Lee, at 13, brought it home from junior high school.
"Let's go climb that tree, man," I'd say.
"Time for my bath? Cool, man."
Even when you're young, you make decisions about which new words to start implementing yourself. At its very grooviest, groovy didn't work for me; I don't know why. And as for dude, which came along in the 1980s, well, I already had man, after all; there was no room for dude, man. Dude has never stopped sounding funny to me.
As time goes by, you judge words pretty harshly, using a template that seems darn close to arbitrary. Sometimes it's just that the word or term offends: I avoid what a douche, par example. But even the offensiveness thing is arbitrary: I've become immune to what an asshole, but still cringe at what a dick. 
Some of it is simple contrariness: 24/7. Nope; that nifty shortcut is not for me.
Sometimes it is this, I suppose: I make a judgment, based on nothing but faulty intuition, that a given word will have its day and then fade away. You don't want to start flinging about a new term only to find it is already passé. Alas, this happened for me with "my bad," a crinkle-your-nose funny term when you first hear it, and then suddenly very handy, more succinct, and friendlier than "I did not see your cart; I apologize for bumping it ever so lightly." But when I said "my bad" to T'ai one time, he stopped short, shook his head, and said, "No. Mom. Do not say that," conveying in no uncertain terms that I had missed when "my bad" had morphed from new-and-fun to decidedly uncool. Or at least something that you don't want your mom saying. And of course it's too late by then, because once you've added something to your vocabulary, there it is for the using, and you end up being that pleasant but awkward person who says a chipper "my bad!" to someone much cooler than you when you bump their shopping cart with yours.
All of this is to get to "awesome." I have resisted using awesome for a long time. Remember when it appeared? It was off-putting. Abrasive. Immature sounding. Overused. Like....like what. Like like. And you make a haughty resolution to yourself that you do not need this new word. There are plenty of ways to say the same thing, you tell yourself. And when everyone else is saying, "That thunderstorm last night was awesome!" you actually feel yourself resisting saying it too. Instead you chime in with, "Wasn't it amazing?" and you feel both righteous and ridiculous at the same time. Not because amazing or fabulous or terrific aren't terrific words, but because you know that in that moment, awesome would really nail the moment in a way that your po' ass righteous word choice doesn't. You know you are just being stubborn and want to keep being right about how long you've gone without joining the masses-of-lesser-will-and-poorer-judgment who say awesome, like, 24/7.
I would like to give myself permission to say awesome now and then. This blogpost is to nudge me toward the freedom to say something is awesome when it is. I am going to practice exercising that freedom, at first quite deliberately, until I really am free. When "that was awesome!" pops out of my mouth without judging myself, when I say it in a moment of unbridled enthusiasm...That moment, my friends -- that will be...so great wonderful really cool, man...what's the term I'm looking for?