About "bein cool"

As i love sayin, Let me explain. Coolness is an abstract concept and carries much more weight than its frivolous wording indicates. It doesn't, as folks tend to infer, hinge upon good looks or a drawl. It could, but that's not the kinda coolness we'll worry about. That's as passe as a local train. It hinges, rather crucially in my opinion, upon two not unrelated things: first, presence of substance, and second, a tenacious ability to cling to your identity.

The first is easy to explain. But before i do that, let me bung in the fundamental characteristic of "cool" here. Its anything that is different from what most blokes do/know/have and yet care about. It'll get clearer as we move on.

Getting back to substance, we need to understand that most folk know a little bit about everything . When people are cool, is when they know a little about everything, but also, in addition to this common denominator, know a hell of a lot about something. Like music. Like sport. Like motorcycles. Like tobacco. Like coffee. Like books. The list is not nearly as endless as i am leading you to think but really it is a very generous criterion.

Identity. This here is a crucial one. It basically flows from our "substance" theory but not in what you would call an obvious manner. Its like this. Picture your self as a flower child hangover from the seventies. You wear sunglasses four inches across, you wear brown corduroy, and dual color sneakers. You dont mind polka dotted shirts with collars that look that could easily be mistaken for a small plane's wings. You wear your hair long and shave once in a week. You smoke three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, have an ambidextrous talent for rolling joints and eat three cheese rich burgers a day. You listen to Dream theatre and Rush, think nDJ stands for Desk Job and you haven't a clue about Trance.

And you are in B-school.

(Granted this is a nasty picture i draw, but then the greatest breakthoughs could have never come without experiments that refrained from animal testing, right? )

So this here is an uncool situation. (or have i tipped my hand by being too obvious?). Anyway, my point is this. If you cling on to even this time-warp identity for a fair amount of time, you'll be cool. Any step towards modernity, in the face of relentless social cold shouldering, would send you hurtling rather inevitably into the dark abyss of social outcastism.

Why? Like i said, coolness is about being acceptably different. And if you have the second, the first will follow. In due course. The trick here is to cling onto what ever germ of an identity you have, and just wait it out.

Simple enough, eh?