What It Means To Be Cool

I am the atypical teenage female. I wake up in the morning, throw on a t-shirt and jeans, stare at my hair and then run a brush through it. I rarely ever do my make up, I don't put fancy product in or straighten my hair. My shirts generally come in solid colors, that are cut appropriately.

Sometimes I look at myself and wonder how it didn't happen to me. How did I not become one of those girls with her make up, styled hair, and layered, outfits.

Growing up I never wanted that giggling, gaggle of cloned girls. Absolutely nothing about them appealed to me. I viewed them as the lame ones to a certain extent. And it wasn't because I had been warned about them or because I had developed some society based notion. They just bored me.

I thought everyone else was the cool crowd. Like the girl who dressed gothic, but squealed over her cats like there was no tomorrow. We would later bounce around my room making a terrible parody of the Wizard of Oz and Home Alone. That was cool.

But something I don't think is ever really mentioned enough is the difficulty of entering a group of the non popular kids. It was sixth grade. My friend brought me over to the table she sat at with her friends for the first time. They wanted to know why I was there. This was their group, their table.

Later, I suffered minor abuses. It was like I had to earn the right to be with them. I was often told I wasn't "weird enough". Generally that's not something you strive for, but it actually hurt me quite a bit. It was like the equivalent of being told your not cool enough. Being "weird" was something I thought was cool, something that I loved about other people. 

I was eventually accepted by all of them. We sat at our booth, at lunch with the little map of the world in our agendas and discussed world domination through weapons made of pie. I, of course, was to have legions of squirrels at my command.

And yes, that is honestly what I believe to be cool. I strive for that everyday. I try to drink tea every morning because that's cool, read battered books from our house because that's cool, write traditional letters to my friends and send them in the male because that's cool, write fiction and random stories everyday because that is cool. I like to talk about philosophy and views on the world. Or about how insanely cool it is to think and learn the way we humans do.
 

I don't like loud parties. I have no interest in drugs or alcohol, the latest fashion trends, celebrities, who wrote the music I'm listening to, or if so and so did blah blah blah.

I watch t.v. shows with my mom almost every night. I tell her things like the time my sister let me watch an R rated movie. I don't lock myself in my room and I don't spend hours on my phone calling or texting people. If I'm going to talk to someone I'd like to do it in person. 

I look at my life and wonder why I never wanted to be with the "popular" girls. Certainly many of them were pleasant to talk too, and had good values. But I still never wanted them. I wanted the people who weren't afraid of showing how smart they were, the ones who marched to their own drum and decided things for themselves. I never spared a thought to what the "popular" kids might think because they were the lame ones.

I still have plenty of problems though. It was never perfect, or even better than what other girls go. I had terrible self-esteem issues, placed everyone on incredibly high pedestals, and believed that I wasn't a good person. While most of that has been picked apart and thrown in the Trash Bag of Stupid Thoughts I'm still not as confident as I would like.

So there's plenty of stuff I still need to work on. But one thing I will never have to worry about are the girls who frown at me when I'm too loud or laugh behind my back. Why? Because they are lame, so hopelessly and ridiculously lame. 

Why should I care what they think?