Being Cool and Being Not

For years I’d longed with my (crappy) guitar, singing top40 songs over and over again (mostly pieces like Greenday’s, Cranberries’, RCHP’s, Nirvana’s, The Cure’s… clichés like that) in my middle high years, and yet still don’t have appropriate people to appreciate my skill in… well –being a chick playing strings. My crappy vocals should be forgiven, I thought because simply I was a chick playing guitar! How cool is that? I was 13 and I can play Nirvana’s About a Girl, haha… Yet, people still didn’t consider me to be cool. Then, I started believing that I must be weird. “I am a weird chick playing strings!” I often said that to myself. A weirdo. Or nerd. Or dork.

In my high school years, I’d spent my times finding the true meaning of being cool; the true essence of how to get along with many people, how to get boyfriends, how to dress well, etc etc which drove a 15 year-old crazy. I made many friends, but still I could not get along with people I consider as COOL.

At that time I thought those cool people only friend beautiful people; those girls with clean polish from beauty parlor, narrow waist, and full tits, for example. A weird girl playing strings (though still cannot sing in tune or playing other songs besides “Time of Your Life” which those cool people don’t ever listen too) who spent more of her times reading weird books would not be considered as beautiful enough to get along with cool guys.

Those cool guys listened to The Used and Avanged Sevenfold and Finch (emo and friends were hip those years), which I have heard years before and I don’t like. They listened to the same songs of Rancid, NOFX (“Radio radio radio…” –this song was Rancid’s, mon Dieu!), and Sublime (I don’t practice Santeria…), and called themselves punk, because being a punk was also hip. You know, that kind of trying to find your inner self in high school years… Being a punk or emo or biker or reggae or all of them together is cool. And yet, people had never recognized me, a chick on strings who pretended to like The Used, Sublime, NOFX, Bob Marley or all them together to be noticed as a cool chick. Hahahahahaa… it always makes me laugh to recall those years again.

That’s there. I almost ended up to be a desperate chick surrounded by street punks when I met my first boyfriend there. He played guitar in a ska band which I thought totally AWWWEEESOME (that day). I dated him, and apparently he is the one who really caught the message I have tried to howl out since my puberty years; that I am a cool chick playing string, though I am quite weird. So, we built our band together, a cool one I suppose, named The Frankenstone.

Sometimes, being in a band can be sooo cool. I play BASS, an instrument which always drove me feeling stupid for its giant frets. I also learnt to sing in tune, which I have never accomplished before. Even, I learnt to sing backing vocals, which is very difficult because I have to sing the third tone of the song (though sometimes I simply sing aloud if I have to avoid my crappy not-tuned vocals). I also learn about more chicks playing strings like Kim Shattuck, girls in Veruca Salt, Courtney Love, Charlotte Hetherley, and so on. I also learn about girls on other instrument like Tobi Vail and Amanda Palmer. I also learn about girls who don’t have instruments at all but yet still known in cool people’s world, like Nancy Spungen.

I also write my own zine! My writing skill is apparently considered in cool people’s world. And talking about cool people, apparently I just realized that those cool people I adore back in my high school years are even not as cool as I AM now. Ha! My boyfriend is a good mocker, and he can find tawdry sides of those people who I thought cool. He taught me how to mock people and put ourselves above them all. Even, now I can see that not all girls-playing-music be so cool. I can say Veruca Salt and Jossie And The Pussy Cat are not as cool as Michelle Branch, seriously! So, I am really now a cool girl. Hahahahaha… I think I have completed my self-actualization.

I stepped to my college years as a girl who plays bass in a band which had launched an album. I can get along with many people now, those who are cool and not. Now I am mature enough to say that people are equal, their cool-level is not determined on how they know much about music and craps like that. Now I am mature enough to be polite to people, to study hard and get excellent marks in English Letters, to listen to the songs that I like, to read books that I love, to know that to be cool is not to sing old punk hymns and be arrogant all the time. To be cool is to be ME. Because I am cooler than any other people in the world.

Then I suddenly realized that my faith could have been so much worse than now. Maybe I could lost my virginity for several dirty punk streets, drink cheap liquor every night and talk about nonsense philosophy about religion, welfare state, and things like that which lead us to nothing, sleep on the street, mock my mother, failing on my study, make ugly tattoos for paintings like roses or other nonsensical sculptures… Simply, lost my life for being cool. But now I have had an experienced cool guy to guide me through this hard life, and he had put the foundation to make a cool chick inside of me revealed.