Baldies' Blog began originally in the UK by a 26 year old journalist with a blood cancer on a mission to inform the world about bone marrow donation.

He has since died, and I took on the cause of making cancer care more transparent for everybody.

Cancer is a disease that will touch everybody through diagnosis or affiliation: 1 in 2 men will be diagnosed and 1 in 3 woman will hear those words, "You Have Cancer."

I invite you to read how I feel along my journey and
how I am continuing to live a full life alongside my Hodgkin's lymphoma, with me controlling my cancer, not my cancer controlling me.

I hope that "Baldies' Blog" will prepare you to handle whatever life sends you, but especially if it's the message, "You Have Cancer."

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

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.”

3 comments:

Frank said...

You go girl ... you are very cool ... in the sense you describe. And you are an inspiration to a lot of folks ... you are a gift to us all.

Thanks.
F

andyson said...

I think cool is defined as the ability to post whatever you are thinking at any moment of the day without caring about what other people think.

I decided against having my own black-hair post-sct fro and got a hair cut today. Random hairs on the side of my head were sticking up (as opposed to the thousands laying flat against my skull) and it wasn't a good look for me.

I do have a kick-ass beard though.

Thanks second puberty!

Hilary, you're cool, even if other people don't think so, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

B

Anonymous said...

Not that anyone is keeping track or that it matters in the big picture, but I see you as cool, too. Cool because you know yourself and are sharing that. Cool because you have a gift for description that makes it so easy for me to see what you describe, be it a concept ("cool") or a physical event (shopping for the patent stilletto with X). Cool because you are not taking your life lying down, you are living it with whatever it brings.

Thanks for sharing yourself.
Dianne