Coolness

I've noticed that how cool I feel depends a great deal on how cool the people around me are. So here's a GRAPH of it! Because I adore graphs so.
Also, I realize I use 'you' to mean 'I' or 'me'. But I'm not going back and changing them. So, sorry if this doesn't apply to you, but I think you can deal with it.


(both quantities measured in Coolombs, of course)

a) You kind of feel like their GOD you am so relatively cool. But then you realize just how uncool the people around you are, and so that significantly lowers your coolness levels. It’s a nice balance – feeling massively superior among massively inferior beings. Plus, when you talk with incredibly uncool people, you feel like you're helping out those less fortunate. I've wondered if I can count talking to some people as community service.
P.S. Keep in mind, you're the one in the green shirt. But not the one getting his head licked. You're the OTHER ONE in the green shirt. In case you weren't sure.

b) There comes a point where the uncoolness of your surroundings stops being a novelty and your company just starts to seem incredibly, mind-numbingly dull. Every moment, more and more awesomeness is sucked away from your being. You just feel like the uncoolness of those around you is quicksand and you are sinking deeper and deeper into their pit of uncool. As you marinate in their pesto sauce of boredom, you think to yourself, "You guys are so dull that I know I'm cooler than you, but GAHHH it seems your dullness is rubbing off on me and I am incapable of saying anything remotely interesting."
You want to jump up and scream just to dilute the very concentrated solution of liquid boredom, but all you can do is sit there and drown in your own personal hell of doldrums.

c) This is the Goldilocks state--not too awesome, not too boring. Just right. Note: this level of company's awesomeness is just the slightest bit below yours. They are entertaining and cool enough to contribute to a meaningful conversation and/or hilarity, but you are just the slightest bit cooler so you still feel superior. But this time, you're not feeling superior to the most severely messed-up, antithesis-of-awesome creatures to ever roam the earth; you're feeling superior who are already moderately awesome. YOU ARE SO COOL.

d) Have you ever gotten the chance to come in close proximity to someone you really respect? If you're anything like me, the encounter probably went something like this:
- See awesome person do awesome thing (e.g., attend a Hank Green concert in a cafe in San Francisco and sit in the FIRST ROW. It was great; I was looking up the marvelous nose of Hank Green for a good couple hours.)
- Be amazed and fangirlishly speechless. Like this. Exactly like this. In fact, this is an incredibly accurate representation of my face during the concert. :


Generally, when you meet a celebrity, you fall into one of two categories:
1. Stunned silence/shyness-induced creepiness:
And when you finally work up the nerve to talk to them and possibly to bestow upon them a gift that seemed like a good idea when you made it but now just seems like a badly-made and slightly creepy badger figurine, your vocabulary suddenly shrinks by 70% and everything you ever learned about sentence structure takes a temporary vacation from your brain. You're left saying something like this:
And then you realize just how weird and creepy you must seem and make your getaway. In the least cool way possible, of course.

OR

2. Talkatively and ramblingly and embarrassingly praisingly, (gosh, that was a lot of adverbs) you continue to talk and talk until you bore the poor celebrity to death:
And neither of those options seem excessively cool. In fact, you feel so uncool, the graph goes NEGATIVE.

So, pick a moral of the story:
a. One should endeavor to only hang out with people slightly less cool than oneself
b. Everyone feels uncool at some point. Whatever. It's probably not as big a deal as you think it is.
c. Behind a streetlight is a bad hiding place.