coolness

Does anybody ever feel cool?

I feel very uncool lately. Maybe the word is just stuck in my head from a podcast i recently listened to. But I'm just not cool. Now that i think more about it, outside of my current emotional state, i suppose there have been moments when i felt passing coolness--pleased about what i was wearing, that it conveyed the best of my sense of style (which has a narrow margin for coolness).

But lately i feel bored with myself and (as i have stated) very uncool. This is not great fodder for a blog entry, but i'm trying to get back to just writing something, so this is what we're stuck with.

Funny thing is, i can remember clearly in middle school hating the word "cool." I thought it was SO outdated and just sounded silly. I was certain i would never use it except perhaps to mock its use. Within, probably months, it was part of my regular vocabulary. How do such things happen? How did i go from thinking it was a dumb sounding word to using it to say everything from "okay" to "trendy" to "suave" (and boy, what a wide range of meanings there!) ha.

Julia Cameron would tell me to write down the "blurt" i'm hearing right now ("GOD, you are SO uncool!") and turn it around into an "affirmation". Ok, um, "I am so totally cool"? Since it's the only one that comes to mind, i reject it because it sounds so totally stupid! What is it that "coolness" IS, and what about it is the thing that i think i ought to be?

I suspect, however, that "coolness" probably has most everything to do with others' perception, in which case, it's a pretty poor gauge for anything worth staking my sense of identity on. And it brings me back to the first question -- does anyone ever feel cool? And when they do, is it only because they think, in that moment, that other people are seeing them as cool?

Why do i care? Because i have to write about something today. And there you have it.

Why is it that, when i know that i more greatly admire those who don't care about whether they're "cool," i still worry about my own level of coolness?? (Did Katharine Hepburn feel cool? Well, I think maybe she did. She was also rich and famous. And do i really want to be like Katharine Hepburn?)

I thought i'd know better who i am after being in New York. But i feel like i stepped into a great big fog. This is not what i went into graduate school debt for.