Senior English major
In honor of yesterday’s National Coming Out Day, I think it’s time I come out myself: I’m uncool. It’s something I’ve struggled with and ultimately repressed since I was a little boy, but my hope is that after accepting myself, I can live a more fulfilling, open lifestyle as a proud dork.
Last week I was Googling myself and refreshing my Twitter interactions when I came to a different realization: I don’t really care about anything. Not my grades, my job or my comedy — only how cool people think I am. For as long as I can remember, my self-image has been so calculated and my ironic detachment so strong that I have a hard time truly enjoying myself. On top of it all, the fact that I’m an opinion columnist, contracted to write about things I should care about, essentially makes me a jocular juxtaposition, a walking contradiction and a moronic oxymoron, a condescending tricolon of personality that overpowers any shred of carefree, childlike fun.
I wasn’t always like this.
When I was a young warthog, I distinctly remember slow dancing with my mom to Andrea Bocelli in our dimly lit kitchen in Timonium, Md. I don’t know if we did it more than once, and I don’t care. What I do know is that back then, in that moment, I enjoyed every second, step and change of key — just me and my mom, awkwardly dancing, having fun.
Nowadays, I wouldn’t be caught dead doing anything like that unless I had 10 shots of Maker’s Mark in me, for fear of being judged or labeled uncool.
Where did I go wrong?
I’m graduating this spring, and it’s made me reflect a lot about my three years here. When I came in as a second-semester freshman (I had to transfer from community college because I didn’t care about grades in high school — I was so cool), I was starry-eyed with all the possibilities of who I could be. I bounced around different friend groups, ditched some, convinced myself I was too cool for others. I fell into the trap of wanting to be well-liked above all else, leaving me a cross-eyed and painless senior up the junction, bitter over wasted time.
The next time you catch yourself waiting in line for more than an hour to get into Bent’s, do what I do. Stand among the line-cutters and cool cats clad in deep-Vs, wearing flashy button-downs, or sporting ironic, retro snapbacks of teams they probably don’t even support (sorry, I just don’t think there are really any Toronto Raptors fans at this school), and understand this: There are two types of people — those who are cool and those who try to be. Don’t think about it too much, because whichever category you fall in, yes, you were born that way.
The tragedy of coolness is that our natural yearning for it is a fool’s errand. It’s inherently a paradox. As soon as you try for any cool mystique or vibe or quirk, you kill any chance of actually attaining it. You essentially become Orpheus after he loses Eurydice on the way home from Hades, left to live out the rest of his days knowing that, ironically enough, there’s probably nothing cooler (or better) than playing music for your girlfriend.
The remedy to an uncool lifestyle is simple: Be carefree, but not apathetic. Because if you’re apathetic, then you’re prone to feeling above everyone else. And when you feel above everyone else, you automatically can’t be among everyone else.
So, hakuna matata. Hang on to your ego. Don’t try to be cool. Try to have fun.
Drew Farrell is a senior English major. He can be reached at opinionumdbk@gmail.com.
