Just Cool

“Some people are just COOL. And you are one of those people.” –Jane Owen
I want to give a big thank you to Jane Owen for posting this comment that made me grin ear to ear. It’s so simple, and yet, so touching and amusing.
I’ve wondered about this “cool girl” anomaly for a while now.
I probably really started wondering after college, when I entered the working world, and my co-workers asked if I was the “cool girl in high school?”
I wasn’t.
Not a chance. Not even close. I was just me. Cool was not something I was aspiring to be.
I was aspiring to be generous, understanding, compassionate and still successful, and cool, well that just didn’t come along with that territory.
The “cool girls” in high school didn’t seek these traits the way I did.
I’m sure they do know.
Life moves on and high school IS NOT the end all be all people seem to make it out to be.
Really, it was only 3.5 years of my life. I certainly never wanted my life to peak at 16 years old. If that had happened, it would all be down from there.
I was always just me and never considered myself “cool.”
I figured I’d just let everybody think of me the way I was talking about. I think the words “Hotshit” or “snobby bitch” were used a couple times, but I just let it roll off.
In college, maybe I was the cool girl. I never thought about it. I just ran around talking to the people I could talk to and gaining as much understanding from them and their cultures as I can.
Clubbing weekly all over Westchester and Manhattan was a perk, but there was plenty of down times between classes, studying, and partying.
So cool wasn’t on the top of my list. My life was at the top of my list. Trying to finish school so I could make a living and give my child the life I had was at the top of my life list.
The coolness factor, I have to contribute to my friends. They up the coolness quotient for me. I never thought that maybe I upped the coolness quotient for them. That would be crazy.
Then out of school my co-workers INSISTED I was the cool girl in high school. I said absolutely not. I was unique, but not cool or popular.
I wouldn’t want to be pigeonholed or stereotyped. The cool girls at school were kind of mean, and I was having no part of that.
If they meant “cool” as in friendly, down home girl. Then I was a cool girl. If they meant “cool” as in up on the latest trends, lingo, music with the most friends that wouldn’t have suited me either.
I am cool in the manner that I know who I am and I know what I like and I like to spread the wealth. I certainly think everybody else should be happy and chill like me.
Whatever works for you makes you cool.
I just happen to like people. I like everything about them. I like the way they look, they way they talk, the way they live, the way they move, and the way their face changes when their thinking something they are not saying.
All that is interesting to me.
I’m cool because I like people, and they like me.
It’s very difficult to deny somebody who has been nothing but good to you. I guess that is how the “cool” girl label got around to me.
And all you reading today should thank all the people I deemed “cool” and admired for reciprocating the compliment since when I started writing, I went through the whole, would anybody really want to listen to what I’m saying? And I thought, I do live kind of an interesting life. I certainly amuse myself.
But I wouldn’t have been able to put myself out on a public forum and let EVERYBODY know what I do and think daily if I had not been shown some love and given the compliment a couple times that I was just “so cool.”