9 July 2003 (Wednesday)
the miscarriage of cool
Reasons why I will never be "cool":
- I trip over things a lot.
- I think dumb puns are funny.
- I scratch things when they itch. (As a corollary, I cannot abide wedgies either.)
- Just when I think my taste in music is getting hip, I catch myself bopping to Justin Timberlake.
- I am perfectly willing to stick my butt up in the air while fishing around for an object trapped underneath furniture.
- Clubbing and going to bars bores the living daylights out of me.
- I can't drink alcohol. (This probably explains a lot about #6.)
- As for other drugs, I am incapable of casual use. For me trying stuff is so serious, you'd think dabbling in pot was equivalent to getting engaged.
- I am still mostly fashion clueless, and I try really hard to pretend I'm not.
- The more makeup I wear, the sillier I look.
- My appropriate-idiom-fetcher is chronically broken. ("Pleased to meet you." "Thank you," I say.)
- I'm one of those people who tells long stories with no good punch line at the end.
- By default I am nice and sincere, which means I am an easy target for sarcastic wit.
- I have no TV and a pitiful resume of movies watched.
- Thus, any joke with a pop culture reference will go right over my head.
- My dancing style involves a lot of uncoordinated flailing.
- I haven't got the self-confidence to carry off any of the above as the "new cool."
I realized most of these things about halfway through high school, and it was a tremendous emancipation: since popularity and trendsetting were hopeless ambitions, I could just be myself! I started dancing at proms. I stopped putting on makeup every morning. I surrendered to the fact that I would always look back on myself in five years, or two, or one, and wince at the things I'd so wholeheartedly embraced back then, whether it was poufy dresses, political idealism or Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. It was not worth my time, I decided, to chase after the elusive standards of cool. I would learn just enough to avoid social exile, and I would do the rest on my own terms.
Sort of.
Fast forward nine years, and being cool still seems like exhausting work, a task beyond me and not worth pursuing. I have set up residence in the heart of dork-dom, and I am comfortable with my neighbors. But I still want to be cool, despite my lofty rejections of it in theory. I want class and grace and a sharp sense of humor. Sophistication without pretension. Consciousness without self-consciousness. Command of a room, of a crowd, and of myself.
I still wish I could have it. And I wouldn't mind giving up that Justin Timberlake song for it, either.
posted by enjelani @ 07:03 PM PST [ link ]
6 July 2003 (Sunday)
maybe it's the humidity
Settling into a new (temporary) residence at the moment. There are fireflies and cicadas here. The landlord was oddly apologetic in his description of the neighborhood: it's not a bad neighborhood by any means, he kept saying, it's a very pleasant place really, I feel quite safe when I'm there, I really do. I was bracing myself for something vaguely crackhouse-like in atmosphere, but it's very respectable little house on a quiet street of respectable little houses. Everyone I've waved to so far has returned the gesture, with a friendly "hello." Everyone is also black. Maybe that's what the landlord was trying to say. I wonder if he's racist, or whether he thought I might be.
I've spent the past several weeks feeling, at times, confused and a bit scared -- not only do I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, but it seems like nobody else does either. I have that sneaking suspicion that we're all participating in the decline of a civilization, a slow erosion that no one can diagnose for certain until the damage is done. A bout of depression in the collective unconscious. I don't know what to do about it except push it aside, and carry on.
Then again, it is that time of month, and the pressure's on at work. Maybe that's all it is.
posted by enjelani @ 08:53 PM PST [ link ]