I am not cool. Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not. And I never have been. If you’ve been thinking that by hanging out with me, or being my friend, or reading my blog, you are identifying with some kind of “coolness,” then you are wrong. Dead wrong. So sorry.
Proof? I love prepositional phrases. I love drawing parentheses around them– all of them– in a sentence, thereby reducing the possible subjects. But I love simply identifying prepositions, too. Love it. Around, with, over, beyond…. These are great words. So it might not surprise you when I say that I also love to diagram sentences. This is great fun. This is exciting. Sad, I know. And I love solving equations. Honestly, your simple algebra is just too fun. I could solve for x all day.
I also have a favorite punctuation mark. The semicolon. I love it. Love it, love it, love it. It makes me happy to use it every time I use it, and I try to use it a lot.
It gets worse. I was in the orchestra in high school. In High School. All Four Years. And I didn’t even play a wind instrument. I took a full academic roster of courses all the way to the end, which means that, in my senior year, I didn’t have any free periods. Why not? Because I liked school (can you say geek?) and I didn’t have any cool friends to hang out with.
I’ll admit there is some minimal evidence to the contrary. For example, I dated a quarterback for my junior and senior years, but he went to a different school, and it wasn’t a cool school. And I was elected to the Homecoming court my senior year, but that was just because all the nerds got together and tried to elect a queen. But it didn’t work; I was a runner-up. (Did you see the semi-colon?)
Nonetheless, I have been mistaken for cool. As I said earlier, some of you may have made that mistake yourselves. But I like classical music too much to be cool, I like to read too much to be cool, I like sentences too much to be cool, I like words too much to be cool. I have a list of them. Not favorite words, necessarily, but just good words, that sound good, and are nice to say.
I am Not Cool.
But yesterday, just a brief twenty-nine hours ago, in fact, I think I got a toe– just a toe– over the edge into Cool. I got an iPod.
Okay, I’ll admit that it’s an iPod Shuffle, so it’s not near as expensive as a full-on iPod, and so maybe not as cool. But I think it is just as cool, if not more cool.
It weighs only .78 ounces and is .33 inches thin. It’s so small, and sleek, and slender. And it’s white, so you can see it. So Everybody can see it, and think I’m cool.
It is loaded with 120 songs, and last night, while my husband and guests chatted at the conclusion of the Academy Awards, I changed sheets and changed towels and folded laundry in isolated bliss, reveling in song after song that no one could hear but me. So Cool.
And this afternoon, while my guests discussed business (they are musicians– so cool) and my children played with friends all around me, I sat at my desk and wrote letters and listened to my iPod, and was virtually unaffected by the din. Very cool.
I think it is only fair to admit that the iPod was not my idea. No, that would mean I was maybe a little bit cool. Which I’m not. (See above.) The iPod was Bill’s idea, my husband’s idea, because he loves me. And he went and bought it, and he loaded it with really cool songs, and he gave it to me. And now I can listen to Bono and Pearl Jam and Train and their ilk whenever I want to, all by myself.
That Bill gave it to me should come as no surprise, really. I mean, any coolness you might sense in me comes directly from him. The fact that I like Pearl Jam and Train is the result of his influence– his coolness– leaking into the atmosphere that envelops us, and working its way into my musical taste. My sense of humor, too, and my acceptance of new ideas, and my comfort with what is unusual– all of this comes from him.
So maybe Bill, and not the iPod, is my Mojo.
What is Mojo? I had to ask, because I didn’t know, because I’m not cool, and Bill told me, because he knows: Mojo is “coolness; that which makes you hip.”
Thanks, Cool Mo.
