Welcome to Musing Interruptus. Thank you for clicking, thank you for listening. My greatest aspiration as a child was to be cool, fully knowing it wouldn’t mean anything if I called myself cool. I had to earn it. I would have to get someone to say it. Kinda like a Beatlegeusse, Beatlegeusse… Beatlegeusse …. thing.
I knew that cool people looked and acted a certain way. At 7, The New Kids on the Block, the Fonz from Happy Days, and Amelia Earhart;  at 9, my cousin the musician, at 39 Lilly Tomlin and Simone de Beauvoir… and Bono.  From 7 to 9, they all had a few traits in common, they were aloof and calm, assured, attractive, had leather jackets. They looked like rockstars. The real kind, not glam rock. The New Kids On the Block had their own collectible cards.
A few years later, I struggled to identify coolness in the people around me. Maybe I was the cool one. Although, I most definitely didn’t feel calm, controlled, aloof… far from it. I forgot about my quest for coolness and got wrapped up in being me and not what was expected of me. I realized I wasn’t cool, and that was ok. By the time I got to high school I knew a few things about not being cool and the importance of controlling the narrative. So I got a friend, who was very sociable, to start calling me by a particular nickname. Still not cool, but at least I wasn’t going to be called something that would socially scar me for life. Plus it was versatile. Clothing is a big part of being cool. I didn’t like fashion trends or any trends. I kinda wanted to dress in Victorian-era dresses, long busty dresses. I thought they were sexy as hell. The whole, decolletage thing was aspirational.  Later I realized that the empire cut is not for me, it just made me look like a pregnant teenager. Not to dis the pregnant teenager niche here, but it wasn’t my idea of cool.
I understood that perception was important. Being in control of people’s perception of me was something I wanted to do, never actually succeeded in, awkwardly. I was not good at it. A series of bad acting moments, strung together one after the other. I still remember and cringe. Putting it into perspective, the best people have cringe-worthy moments to speak of. That is just a fact. Best people for what, I couldn’t tell you.  Maybe, just maybe I got all of that out of my system. Probably not. It's a matter of self-discovery if you ask me. I’d like to say, no regrets. But I would cringe at that too.
I don’t long to be cool, like my 7-year-old self. I like to be me. Still awkward, confidently awkward. Like when I had to tell the waiter today that it smelled like urine was baking in the sunny garden area where we were sitting. For some reason I felt I had to clear up, it had not been me. Confidently awkward. You just know that I would have owned it, if it had been me.
I once thought my taste in music would make me cool. But a dear friend once exclaimed, mid gettogether that he knew it was my iPod playing because my music made him want to speak in words of more than three syllables. I assume that he was not remarking on my coolness. But it's ok, I was over wanting to be cool- I wanted to be a writer. The words comment would somehow work in my favor. Cont. Reading

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