geek is chic

Geek is the new chic, and suddenly its “cool” to wear oversized, grandma glasses and love obscure art and British underground music.  In fact, the more obscure you are in your tastes, the cooler you are.  Do you have the latest gadget?  Have you paid $500 to waste away in the desert at a music festival lately?  How many cat pictures featuring misspelled WordArt dialogue have you laughed at today?  The anti-cool is now the longed after goal; which leaves us all scrambling and competing to be the snarkiest, the most old fashioned, the most ironic. The anti-cool is now the cool. This is a lot of work.

I find that I naturally hit the cool mark on some things right away - my claustrophobia somehow manifests itself when I don’t have the maximum field of vision resulting in huge glasses that I’ve worn in various shapes for the majority of my life.  Huge glasses are also in order as I’m legally blind and have chronic dry eye – a debilitating combo on the quest for sex appeal.  I love The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Mumford & Sons really speaks to my soul.  I always have my SLR camera with me, even though conversely, and very uncoolly, I like to spend hours alone in the dark enlarging them.  I speak French fluently... which helped me name this blog post.

However, I also naturally miss the cool mark on MOST things.  I crave People magazine and I can’t get enough Bravo reality television.  I’m not rich enough to dress like I’m poor; my wardrobe consists mostly of black and beige and I hate wearing accessories.  I like that my ancient Dell laptop’s hinge is completely broken, tilting the whole screen to the left so that my head’s now permanently cocked to one side giving the illusion when you speak to me that I’m engrossed in whatever you’re saying.  I like my iPhone 3G, released circa 2009.  I have brown hair, but unlike Zoey Deschannel, my eyes are also brown; a thoroughly boring combination…that I like.  I’m addicted to social media - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest - you name it.  I can’t get enough and I’ve wasted hours on these sites so now I sometimes even think in statuses.  I don’t like cats whether in real life or in funny poses on the Internet.  I take that back—there was one cat with a smushed-in face admiring himself in a giant pair of Dior sunglasses that I actually have saved on my phone…it kills me.

I would find it absolutely exhausting to eradicate all my nuances that make me too much of a girl or too neurotic or too shallow or too boring.  I like my tendencies, and why shouldn’t I?  I have no desire to be cool…even if that actually means being uncool in a very specific way.  Maybe someday it’ll all swing in my favor and everyone will be striving to be the short girl from the sticks of Pennsylvania with untamable hair, a refined taste for refrigerated mashed potatoes, inappropriate feelings toward most male news broadcasters, and a fetish for puns.