Cool

I have never been, by my own definition, cool. That term always belonged to other girls, my grade school friend Jennifer's older sister Juie who had Molly Ringwald's 16 Candles haircut, posters of Duran Duran, and a complete disdain for everyone younger than her. Cool.

Or the older girls I saw cruising Fe--Santa Fe St. In Salina--who had thick eyeliner and smoked and had their own cars and seemed untouchable by things that haunted me like wanting to be liked and feeling unattractive to boys.

Or, when I got to college, the kids who were so plugged in to their thing, music or art or whatever, that they really seemed to not even see the rest of us, like we were invisible obstacles on whatever planet of awesome they inhabited.

But, and this is a big one, I think, seriously, that I may finally be sort of, kind of, dare I say it, cool. Possible evidence to that fact: I really don't care what people think any more. I mean, at all. If I want to wear cowboy boots and a dress and a cardigan and sort of look like the love child of Courtney Love and Loretta Lynn, so be it. I think misogynistic rap lyrics are wrong but I rock out to them at the gym and in my car. I'm embracing my multitudes and contradictions for the first time.

Point 2: pop culture references at the drop of a hat that. 4 kids I love hollered "yo ho ho" at me in the hally today--I later learned they'd just left a class where they were reading Hamlet--and my response was "and a bottle of Brass Monkey, when my girlie shakes her hips she sure gets funky.". Yeah. I said it.

Point 3: and most importantly, I can laugh at myself and not just when others are laughing. Today, I said something really dumb about why i don't wear a watch anymore. For those of you who were there, ugh. I stopped wearing a watch because it made me so anxious, I was constantly checking it, feeling like I had to plan and time everything. It made me nuts. But, today, I said I stopped wearing it because "I didn't want to be a slave to time anymore.". Oh, god, even writing it makes me feel like a douche. But, and this is why I may be cool, I immediately said I knew the comment made me sound like an asshole, and we all had a good laugh at it.

Finally, I think I mint be cool because, after all this time of feeling like I wasn't I sort of don't care anymore if I am. And that makes me ultimately cool.

Right? (okay, maybe I still care a little :)