Cool Like Dat

Here's the dilemma. Regrettably, I’ve come to learn that I’m kind of cool. And by "cool" here, I mean more or less hip to some stuff that the innovative and sometimes slightly subversive kids of the world are up to--even when I'm not doing it myself because I'm not interested, or for other reasons--and I have some attachment to snarky humor and irony. And I'm at least minimally culturally aware. I mean, I'm not too cool (I don't have bangs, for example, and when I did, in eighth grade, it was not cool), but I'm kind of cool, and I frequently wish I weren't cool at all. I have a friend, a sweet, sweet girl who sells advertising for a radio station in California's uncool Central Valley. A girl who is getting married soon to a man (definitely cute, based on photos I've seen, and presumably also kind and devoted to her) who manages a supermarket there. She has acrylic nails and buys home decor at Hallmark. I envy this wonderful, dear friend of mine her totally unselfconscious, irony-free life.

Rewind a few months. When I was living in the East Village, the landscape of first dates I had with cool boys was so vast, I can't even step back to adequately survey it. Musicians and painters and Oberlin grads galore. Boys who lived in very dirty converted industrial spaces in very bad neighborhoods. Boys who wore colorful Pumas that came from very, very limited editions. Boys who spun records, and boys who owned bars where other cool boys spun records. Anyway, needless to say the whole experience was exhausting, and unrewarding, and either they were fraudulent, or I behaved fraudulently when I was near them to impress them, or both. So I was essentially single, and painfully, the whole time I lived in New York. (N.B.: That bit about me being single all that time is basically a fib, on account of my ongoing long-distance dramas with my 'Tross in California, affectionately so called to shorten the nickname Albatross, which I got sick of saying after many hundreds and millions of times over five-plus years. But I digress.)

So eventually I thought all I really wanted was a totally uncool guy. After all, who wants cool as an exchange for a real and meaningful relationship? Certainly not me. At least not any more, now that I'm a grown up with nothing to prove except my own real happiness—and that only to myself. So I convinced myself that I wanted to meet just a nice, uncomplicated, irony-free man, maybe even someone who unselfconsciously held down an office job, and didn’t criticize or scrutinize stuff he deemed uncool, and then I could be happy.

Eventually I did meet a man like that. Sort of. I met a man who was so honest with himself and with me that I never felt insecure or unloved...even though it was much too early in our relationship to feel loved unconditionally, but I totally did, because he encouraged it. (That should have probably been the first red flag, but I tend to ignore those anyway.) He was an Ivy grad times three different schools. Jewish. Tall and handsome, with pretty, light eyes. From a good, loving family. Sent me dozens of postcards through the mail for no reason with little drawings on them. Man of my dreams, maybe? Maybe.

But then one day, we're talking, and I made some totally innocuous reference to Bobby Brown, husband of Whitney, singer of "Everybody's Humpin’ Around." Silence. This man didn't know who Bobby Brown was. There was no excuse for this. At six years older than me, and someone who grew up in this country, this man fit squarely in the demographic of people who have no excuse for not knowing who Bobby Brown is--except for a totally mind-blowing failure to understand (or participate in) pop culture.

Later, he would turn up for a date in pleated-front pants. And I would be mortified, and I would at that instant feel in my gut that we (I) couldn't recover from that. And we wouldn’t.

Now, I'm not a big Bobby Brown fan. Frankly, I don't care one way or the other about Bobby Brown. But I think people ought to be a part of the pop cultural conversation and know who he is. So it turns out--as I suspected--I don't need someone cool enough to own or work at a bar or play an instrument or wear limited-edition Pumas, but I would like someone aware enough to understand a passing, inconsequential reference to Bobby Brown. And I think my need for that kind of silliness is a curse--because what does it really matter?--but it is what it is and unfortunately there’s no changing it.

Anyway, it’s my prerogative.