why do people call you "cool" in a pained yet mocking way?
There are certain people at work who react to my clothes - in particular my outside clothes (coat, hat) - by saying things like; "you're looking very downtown," or "i see you're looking very cool, Soho, Village...". Which I will caveat immediately - I do not look like any of these things, at least by my understanding of these loaded terms - i'm not wearing anything by obscure belgian designers, anything you might see in a self-published groovster mag whose models are guys in bands i never heard of, or anything even vaguely sexy. And 90% of my indoor clothes are distinctly frumpy - ann taylor pants, eileen fisher sweater, naturalizer shoes, and target underwear. The act of naming this stuff explicitly is powerfully depressing. I think my ass got lumpier, my boobs saggier, my hair greyer, and my politics more uninformed just by writing this all down. So what do the work people mean? I've been thinking about it - 90% of what invokes these comments are my thrifty clothes. Which clearly date me, as my idea of thrifty nice is 40's, 50's, early 60's - not the 70's, 80's and 90's stuff that actually cool kids like. Which means that the work people and me are officially uncool, as we are stuck in the patterns of our youth. We froze our assessments of groovy by about 30, and stayed there. which means i'm as lame as they are. because frozen groove is distinctly uncool. I think. well, I know frozen intellectual thought is insanely awful and sad (the "i had one good idea and wrote a book and got tenure and i still have that same idea and all the theoretical apparati that went with it and i'm not moving one inch" professor comes immediately to mind). Great minds move. Is it the same for great looks? Are signature looks ok, but signature thought is not? or can the thought/look be sufficiently dense with productive materials so as to continue to be creative, even if it's not "new?" Neither my intellect nor my wardrobe are sufficiently loaded to let me be creative via pastiche/collage/reorganization, let alone supportive of true avant-garde new production. So I guess i'm back to frozen cool, which is just plain sad.
I started thinking about this in part because of the way the work people said the words "cool," "downtown," etc. - and now i think i understand the impulse behind the tone. the tone was one of very light anger/envy - somewhat sneering even as it was admiring. And it's because they think I am/was one of the (here comes a stomach-churning embarrassment painful phrase even to write) "cool kids" in high school, back when we used these very clothes to mark the terms of cool-for now/then. It's what they wanted to say to me 20 years ago, but only thought. Yuck. The whole thing is depressing.
I started thinking about this in part because of the way the work people said the words "cool," "downtown," etc. - and now i think i understand the impulse behind the tone. the tone was one of very light anger/envy - somewhat sneering even as it was admiring. And it's because they think I am/was one of the (here comes a stomach-churning embarrassment painful phrase even to write) "cool kids" in high school, back when we used these very clothes to mark the terms of cool-for now/then. It's what they wanted to say to me 20 years ago, but only thought. Yuck. The whole thing is depressing.
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