Now I don’t like to complain. Well, actually I do. I always say, “When life gives you lemons, you squeeze the juice into other people’s eyes.” If something crappy is happening to me, I like to share the wealth with those around me. So grab a bottle of Visine and settle in.
Here’s my problem: I’ve basically spent my whole life trying to be cool. This has basically consisted of a quest for conformity with the people who have been already deemed cool. I’ve worn the same clothes as everyone else, talked the same way, played all the right sports and jumped off of several bridges (there’s your answer, Mom). Now I have never put this much energy into anything else in my whole life, and so one would expect that I would have achieved my goal of being cool. I mean, if I had put this much energy into something else, anything else. Let’s say a huge Lego monument to Belinda Carlisle. For argument’s sake. Well, if that were the case, I would have opened up a museum featuring life-sized animatronic models of ALL the Go-Gos.
If Marty McFly and a suped-ep Delorean ever stop by, I will remedy the poor choice I made so long ago. For now though I must live with my mistake. Mistake? Yes, mistake. Because as you’ve probably guessed by now, I am not cool. At no point in my quest for coolness have I ever been cool. It’s not like I had it and lost it. If cool were a place somewhere, I would be a place that was like really far away from there…and I’d probably be warm on top of that. See! I’ve just proven my point because that last lame pun on the duality of the word cool was certainly not at all cool. Being not cool doesn’t even bug me too much; it’s the things that I had to give up in my quest for coolness that really irk me.
I really used to like Dungeons and Dragons. Heck, I loved it and appropriately so. It combined the fantasy world and the simple math skills that a nerdy, uncool kid craves in his life. Unfortunately, the cool kids frowned on my twelve-sided dice and the handy leather pouch that my brother had bought to keep them in. Out with the pouch, out with the dungeon masters, out with the fun.
Back in elementary school I used to wear sweatpants and a sweatshirt to school everyday when it was cold. It made sense; it was the most comfortable clothing there was. Then suddenly middle school hit and not only were sweats not cool, they were also really easy to yank down if you had an inkling to embarrass Bret in front of lots of girls. And people had this inkling.
Finally: I really liked those flip-up shades that I could attach to my glasses. They were perfectly logical, providing me with protection from harmful UV rays when I needed it, and you could just flip them up whenever you went indoors. These were actually cool for a period while A Different World was on the tube. Then Dwayne Wayne lost popularity, and I had to go back to squinting.
The long and the short of it is: I give up. I’m not going to be cool; it’s just not in the cards. That Jamaican lady on T.V. told me so. So it’s time to make up for lost time. My gnome wizard casts a fireball at the socially accepted and slays them all. Hmm, I wonder how many experience points that’s worth…