If you were cool in school…
If you were cool in high school you didn’t ask too many questions. You could tell who’d been to last night’s big metal concert by the new t-shirts in the hallways. You didn’t have to ask and that’s what cool was: the ability to deduce, to know without asking. And the pressures to stimulate coolness means not asking when you didn’t know, which is why kids grow ever more stupid.
A yearbook’s endpages, filled with promises to stay in touch, stand as proof of the uselessness of a teenager’s promise. Not like I’m dying for a letter from the class stoner ten years on, but…
Do you remember the way girls would call out “Love you!” conveniently leaving out the “I” as if they didn’t want to commit to their own declaration?
I agree that the “I” is a pretty heavy concept and hope you didn’t get uncomfortable if I should go into some deeper stuff here.
My friend Willem is travelling around the world and documenting all the cool stuff he sees. This was something he saw written on a white board on his trip from Alberta to B.C.
Sir Ken Robinson discusses the negative effects of school on children’s creativity. Are we just educating children to become professors? Professors who feel their body is just a tool to carry their brain around?
In the end, what is all of this for? Does it make us happy?
Added December 11, 2010
I love that lecture.
But I’m still a little unclear…
Does it make me really cool or really uncool if I bought a shirt at the big metal concert last night?
I guess it makes you real? Depends on why you bought the shirt I think.