June 27, 2012: Post 533 (2012 Day 179)

June 27, 2012

Daily Comment

I used to think that 'cool' meant never being surprised, or, worse, shaken, by anything going on around you. Cool was being unflappable. It was making whatever you did look natural and effortless. And, for most of the first half of my life, cool was what I wanted to be. 

The benchmarks of cool when I was young were Sean Connery's James Bond (as opposed to Ian Fleming's, although the book version was 'way cool, too) and (although I didn't know his name at the time) Neal Cassady, the model for Kerouac's On the Road hero, Dean Moriarty. The coolest places in the world? London and New York City, where I was. The coolest things? Anything anti-authority (yes, I know this sets up internal contradictions. I'm just reporting here).

Cool was also extremely elitist. If you were cool, you were better than those who weren't, no matter what your comparative accomplishments or value to society. In fact, those measures of comparison were themselves un-cool. Odds are, if you thought cool was cool, you were cool. Or that's just how you felt.

Another aspect of cool was who you hung out with. They had to be cool, too. Again, solipsistic elitism. If you were cool, of course the crowd you hung out with was cool, as well. So there was cliquishness, elitism and snobbery in being cool.

Of course, none of this is cool. I rejected this definition of cool in the years after high school. Exposure to people who were cool in some ways and not others, and people who were happily oblivious to your idea of what was cool, who had their own (legitimate) definition of cool, who were obviously cool in ways I had never considered, ways that repudiated my own limited sense of cool, killed my old sense of what and who was cool

It all contributed to my feeling inexperienced, immature, even inadequate. Because, only among high-schoolers would I be considered cool. As a 16-year old hippie whose society became all older hippies, some much older, my 'cool' didn't stand up to much scrutiny. In hindsight, this turns out to be wrong, but at the time, all I could see was how comparatively uncool I was. In the world I inhabited at the time, I felt I had to work at it, and go a little over-the-top to maintain a personal and social sense of cool.


It took a long time - and a protracted period of not being cool (by any definition), of recognizing and accepting my lack of cool without a sense of loss - to reorganize my thinking about what was and wasn't cool. That happened over a decade in my 30s and early 40s. Older definitions of cool were replaced with more egalitarian versions that didn't require me to compromise my recently altered social and spiritual environment. 

It took a long time to formulate new ideas about 'cool.' And even longer to reach the pinnacle of cool, which is, not caring about what is cool at all.

I guess, in some ways, I'm still working on that.

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Food and Diet Section

Today's Weight:        201.2 lbs 
Yesterday's Weight:    200.0   lbs  
Day Net Loss/Gain:     + 1.2 lbs

Year 2012 daily weight from December 31, 2011.

Diet Comment:

The back-and-forth, up-and-down pattern always seems to hold. Skipping breakfast today, as it is lunch-out-day at the Chinese Buffet. What a poet.

Food Log

Breakfast
Skipped.

Lunch

At Ling-Ling's Chinese Buffet:

Mongolian grill: sprouts, peppers, onions, mushrooms, cabbage, broccoli, chicken and pork. Sides: Cucumber salad with peas and kimchee.  

Dinner

Chili (grass-fed beef, peas, black beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, spinach, spices) Not shown: coleslaw, hard-boiled eggs with guacamole.

Liquid Intake
    Coffee:   32 oz,   Water: 76+ oz

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