Thursday, January 28th, 2010...11:41 am
#168: Never Never Never Ever Never Never Never Ever Ever Never Never EVER Lose Your Cool
Let me say right up front that I am not a cool person. I wasn’t cool when I was a teenager, I wasn’t cool at 25, and I am even more not cool now.
I use cool in the sense of calm, laid-back, relaxed, patient, flexible, undemanding, accepting, nonconfrontational — you know, cool.
This frequently gets me into trouble with the young people I work with and also with those who are under my parental care. Either I drive them crazy by being on their cases and all up in their bidness for their slowness, silence, elusiveness, disregard for deadlines etc. Or I drive myself crazy trying to keep quiet and roll with it.
See, for young people, cool trumps all. You don’t push anybody. You don’t express your displeasure with their actions. You don’t demand that they tell you why they didn’t call, or what they were doing instead of what they were supposed to be doing. If you don’t want to deal, you just shut down. Vanish. And if anybody wants to know why, you smile and turn up the volume on your headphones.
I was expressing my frustration with this coolness ethic to my 16-year-old son recently, and he said, to my surprise, “Yeah, that drives me crazy too.” When I looked at him in surprise, he said, “You know, it’s not just old people that young people do this cool thing to. It’s everybody.”
Huge revelation. So young people are often driven insane by their friends’ and colleagues’ refusal to keep commitments and confront problems and negotiate differences too. But they may feel even more powerless than we do to stir things up.
What’s the solution? It isn’t, as most old people feel compelled to do, to yell louder and press harder for a response. But pretending to be chill when you don’t really mean it doesn’t work that well either.
My friend Rita says that when she’s impatient with someone else’s behavior, she sinks herself into some task that she’s been dreading. That way she’s distracted and she gets something done that she’s been avoiding, plus with any luck, the situation she’s been impatient about has resolved by the time she’s finished.
I’ve been trying this. My laundry is done. The packages have been mailed. The blog has been updated. And all the fucking cows have even come home.
But you know what? I’m more uncool than ever.
8 Comments
January 28th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
My memory isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Forget about “used to be”. But I do remember an invitation for a late night cocktail which I took the writer up on. She had a makeshift bar set up in her temporary studio and as the evening progressed I learned not only how to make an exquisite sidecar, but what she was writing, what her life was about, what inspired her, what made her grin and what made her cringe. The day of struggling to maintain patience with exaggerated egos, self-important personalities and superior attitudes was replaced with an evening of laid back camaraderie where honesty was met head on with….”would you like another sidecar” and “oh yes, please”. I found my hostess to be one of the coolest women I’ve ever met. I suppose distraction, in any form, is the answer to maintaining cool.
And I most certainly felt older the next morning.
January 28th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Chef Rhonda, your hostess certainly sounds like a fabulous, fabulous person. I hope one day I am lucky enough to meet her….
January 29th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Yeah. Interesting post. I mean in a deep kind of way.
I mean, ‘cool’ is one of youth’s central problems; but youth thinks it is one its central strengths.
But then, if you deny youth the illusion of the security that ‘cool’ provides, how would society cope with the inevitable uncontrolled outbreak of insecurity amongst its younger, less-wise population?
I mean, they’d be thinking they need advice an all that. And who’d provide that? And who’d pay the insurance claims from the recording artists?
January 30th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Cool does not necessarily make a great parent. Parents should not get distracted during the teen years (or even the ‘tween years, for that matter). I was never cool, but never wanted to be, either.
January 30th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Oh, BTW, I saw that comedienne, you know…what’s-her-face…the one who posed, ahem, in her birthday best…on a talk show (Jay Leno?). Not funny. Atrocious. Like, really UNcool.
January 30th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Well, rest easy, ’cause I’m anything but “cool” 90% of the time and that’s just fine with me. I’m pretty happy with my Type-A, hollering, nail-biting, moody (my husband’s word, not mine), self, especially when dealing with folks, young OR old, who, for whatever reason, think they’re “cool.”
February 6th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Very funny blog – one thing I find quite funnily ironic is the fact that saying the word “cool” is UN-cool nowadays! I suppose we now say things like “sick”.
February 13th, 2010 at 10:46 am
I found you! How cool! I’m off to B&N for the book!
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