I Could've Been So Cool

You know those tv shows and coming-of-age stories with the weird nerdy kid trying desperately and failing miserably to be cool? And the synopsis on the back of the VHS tape always promises it will be a timeless classic because everyone remembers a time in their childhood when they were that person? Yeah, that wasn't me. Some people are born cool, some people try desperately to become cool, and some people are offered a handful of invitations into the "cool" group and puzzle over them, mistake them for coasters, and come back to them years later thinking "huh, I could've been an underground alternative hip-hop guru picking street fights and bootlegging copies of Ill Communication at the age of 8. Go figure."

Okay, maybe that only happened to me.

I was a strange child, but I never noticed. I avoided making friends with people because it was weird and I thought dressing like Laura Ingalls Wilder was cool. I wore denim overalls and had waist-length hair that I wore in braids and I thought it made me look super bad ass, like I was the envy of every kid in the class because I was the only one who could sit on their own hair and I assumed everyone aspired to this ideal.

Now, I went to a school that had a fair mix of different cultures, and it seemed that different cultural groups had different standards of coolness--the Filipino kids were obsessed with singing, break dancing, and bonding with each other over who knew the worst Tagalog swear words; during Chinese New Year the Chinese students suddenly became the most popular kids in the class; and the year everyone figured out I was related to the creator of the Simpsons I did get my 15 seconds of fame. But the group of highly literate Mennonite kids with prairie girl obsessions numbered 2--me and my sister. Maybe there was such a range of "cool" that I couldn't really be considered "uncool", but safe to say when it came to definitions of "cool", mine was outnumbered by about 20 to 1. But I clearly didn't feel an excessive amount of discomfort over this fact, considering I declined all of the offers to broaden my horizons.

For about a year, I had an "in" with a group of kids that had a definition of cool that I do admire a bit today. They were the fearless types. They cut their hair short, owned pirated Beastie Boys cassette tapes, had multiple piercings, and owned tube tops. And for some reason, we got along pretty well. I think. I refused to dance at their sock hops, was too afraid to roller skate, was too embarrassed to sing along to "Naked" by the Spice Girls, and when one of them gave me a copy of Ill Communication I played half of one song in my room and then, perplexed, switched back to the Little Mermaid sound track. I do remember helping them make up the "what if" game, where we just took turns listing interesting scenarios and being impressed with our wild, albeit illogical imaginations: "What if we each had a million dollars and we could buy houses and no one could live in them but us? What if we all dyed our hair purple and we could look like Trollz dols? What if there were no diseases and we all lived forever? What if there were no adults! Then we could fly planes to anywhere we wanted!"

Other than the What If game (and Hide and Go Freak, a fear-based game we were only allowed to play once), I voluntarily confined myself to the sidelines in most of their activities. I have no idea why they wanted to spend time with me, considering my pointed disinterest and direct refusal to participate in 90% of the activities they enjoyed. Now I look back on those times and wonder, "What if I had embraced the lifestyles of my friends?"  I could've cut my hair off with kitchen scissors, pawned the family TV at the shop down the street to pay for my scorpion tattoo, and hitch-hiked to Cypress Hill concerts.

But I didn't.

I grew up sheltered, regardless of all my friends' attempts to break that shelter down, and now I have an Honours degree and I work at a publishing company, but I have no idea if a few rapcore concerts with my friends would have really changed that. My musical tastes have expanded over the years. My piercings have remained confined to my ears, but my hair has fluctuated in length and colour so much I sometimes forget who I was in photographs. I think I spent my late teens compensating for what I missed in my late childhood. I wonder if the other girls had to compensate for anything.

I ran into one of those old friends when I was 14. She had a lip ring and gave me instructions on how to keep someone from tearing out your facial piercings when you're in a fight, while all her friends shouted out choice information about fights they had been in or witnessed. I ran into another one of them when I was 20. She had long blonde hair and worked at a tax agency. It seems that 4th grade was a branching point for a lot of us.