On Being Cool. Or Not.

I'm reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. One of the chapters is called, "Church: How I Go Without Getting Angry," and in that chapter, he talks about the church he attends in Portland called Imago Dei. He mentions "this friend from Seattle named Mark who was the pastor of a pretty cool church near the University of Washington, in the village."

And I realized that my church is not cool. I kind of felt the littlest bit wistful, realizing how uncool our church is, too. If churches had flavor, that cool church would be mocha (and more) and our church would be vanilla.

I was cleaning up the kitchen table after dinner (which my long-suffering husband rustled up since I am still trying to not die from coughing). For some reason, I was thinking about what "kids these days" (I always feel like an old-fogey when I use that phrase and it makes me laugh) are wearing. Specifically, which fashions are cool.

And I realized that I couldn't pick cool clothes out of a well-lit store. I notice what girls wear, but I can't really tell you what cool boys wear. This would be problematic for my kids, if only they actually cared about their appearances.

I've never been trendy, really, except for a time in the eighties when big hair was the rage. My hair just happened to be long, blond and frizzy. I looked like a member of a hair-band. The fashions of the time, leggings and big shirts, worked well for me. There was a time when I could at least recognize the hippest songs on the radio and even hum along.

But my life's intesections with "cool" have been mostly accidental, I'm afraid. I'm terrifically, overwhelmingly not cool.

I don't have an iPod, nor any digital music device. And I don't want one.

I couldn't care less about enormous, expensive leather bags, nor small cupcake-sized dogs to carry around in them.

I can't hum even a line of "Hollaback Girl".

I don't "get" rap and I can't stand how everything is misspelled and mispronounced in modern music.

I don't drink anything stronger that Diet Coke.

I never watched "Sex in the City" and we don't have HBO. Or TiVo.

I still use Blogger for my blog and I use a plain, old, prefab template. I have no polls, no clocks, no "100 Things About Me."

I drive a 1993 Mercury Sable.

I live in the land of Starbucks, yet I don't drink coffee, fancy or plain.

I used to want to be cool, but that was back in 1978. My parents never bought me cool clothes, nor did we go on any cool vacations. I had no cool friends and my hair never feathered in the cool fashion of the day. (Natural curls do not "feather," especially in a rainy climate.) Of course, when you are thirteen, you want to be cool because you don't realize how much more to life there is than blending in like a chameleon.

And when you're forty, you realize it's hopeless and that you never will be cool and that furthermore, who cares? Now I know why my dad wore those hideous shoes and flannel shirts with holes in the elbows. He'd given up on being cool, too.

Cool, shmool. Who needs it?