Up until now, I had always assumed that I was cooler than my parents. It was simply impossible for my middle-aged guardians to be hipper than I was. After all, it was I who read Kurt Vonnegut and watched Edward Scissorhands and Dead Poets Society over and over again. My parents had no such claim to fame. No proof of coolness.

This, however, all changed when I went home last weekend. I was sitting in the passenger seat, staring out the window, admiring the orange-colored leaves, when my mother started singing along to the radio. What was odd was not the mere fact that her vocal cords vibrated, but the words that dripped from her mouth:

“And we’ll hang out in the coolest bars / In the VIP with movie stars / Every good gold-digger’s gonna wind up there / Every Playboy bunny with her bleached-blonde hair...”

Not only did my mother know the lyrics well enough to sing along, but what’s more, I hadn’t even heard this song before. I looked it up later (thanks, Google!) and learned that she was crooning Nickleback’s “Rockstar.” During my weekend excursion, the song popped up on the radio several times again, and I was amazed that I had gone this long without the beat tickling my eardrums.

I had figured that if my parents were ever to become so-called “cool,” it would be at my hand—not after I had left the house. As my mother hummed “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” in the car, I realized that somewhere along the line, I became “the dork,” and she became “the cool one.” I am nevertheless convinced that this transition happened recently, because I am too stubborn to admit that I have been the dork all along.

But I am faced with an alternate reality: the last CD I bought was Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required, and my mother is singing Daughtry and Carrie Underwood, who, evidently, are the hip artists these days.

Conversations with my dad, too, have involved the unexpected, including last week’s plotline of Grey’s Anatomy. “There’s that McDreamy and McSteamy—don’t really like him too much,” he says. “McSteamy doesn’t have much of a personality.”

The funny thing is, they aren’t trying to be cool or a part of my “youthful world.” They are aware that I own every Beatles track ever made, including songs on 1, Love, and even the Across the Universe soundtrack. And the Beatles are not exactly new in town. In other words, if you’re looking for someone hip-to-the-times to emulate, you found the wrong girl. I’m sure if I mentioned to my parents that they knew more about teenage life than I did, they’d laugh. Not at me, per se, just near me.

People at school had been telling me all these years that I was a dork, but I never actually took them seriously. I can’t see why a dork can’t be cool in her own idiosyncratic way. The following statement will prove that I am not one of these elusive, enigmatic, oxymoronic cool geeks: What makes my dad even cooler is that not only does he follow Grey’s Anatomy, but he’s also the first person I go to when I need help with r-sync syntax in my UNIX terminal. (If you understood that last phrase of cyberspeak, then—sorry—you too are afflicted with dorkdom.)

When not espousing the virtues of the full-length, feature film A Hard Day’s Night starring the Fab Four, I would have in-depth conversations with my dad about the wonders of nuclear energy. He referred me to some articles written by MIT professors who supported the expansion of nuclear energy, and I ate them up. Dinner conversations at the Cohler household often turn to the existence of God, the potential presidential contenders, and Jennifer Aniston. Actually, the only time any of us mentioned Aniston was in reference to the fairly recent psychology study that proved there is no single neuron that fires when shown a picture of the ex-Friends star. In other words, happily for our sanity, we have no “Jennifer Aniston neuron.”

Starting sophomore year of high school, calculus became an intriguing appetizer. I hadn’t finished precalculus before I knew how to take the derivative of x-squared, 2x, and it wasn’t long until I learned that the integral of 2x was x-squared. This was all just standard dinner conversation for my dad. In any normal context, dropping derivatives into daily dialogue would make him a dork. But I still swear to his coolness.

So I guess my parents have found the perfect balance between knowledge of contemporaneous society and pure “bookworminess.” Parents as role models—doesn’t that go against the code that we all swore to when we turned 13?

But there’s nothing you can do when you realize that your parents are more privy to pop culture than you are: you have to figure that you’re just a dork.