Laura McGinnis is right. We should stop trying so hard to be something we’re not. That is not cool. But cool shouldn’t necessarily have such a negative connotation. Cool is not cool if you’re trying too hard. Cool is effortlessness, an understanding of grace, an understated confidence. Steve McQueen is cool. Ed Hardy is not. Cool is an essence that permeates our cultural understanding. We look up to cool, but it is also our responsibility to define cool.

What a lot of us fail to understand, and what Wednesday’s column “Why are you so awk?” really got me thinking about, is that cool is individual. You can be absolutely devoted to the analysis of iambic pentameter, and still be cool. Intelligence and passion for a subject is not synonymous with nerd. It’s not fair to downgrade the status of our student body to dweeb simply because we are all seemingly pre-med. Last time I checked, doctors were in the Jewish Mother’s Pre-Approved Book of Husbands. And believe me, if there is an arbiter of cool in our society, it’s Jewish mothers.

There are certainly trendsetters. Interestingly enough, the only thing common among these trendsetters is that they are all unique in some way. They do exactly what McGinnis’s article urged us to do—break the mold. They are not scared to test the boundaries of social norms. We should look up to cool, but we should not let it define us. We fail—and bear with me here, for you are about to read a really schmucky sentence… We fail when we buy into the mass cool.

I warned you it was going to be schmucky.

I’m not sure what I really mean by this “mass cool.” It’s an abstract concept up for your own cool interpretation.

You have to take elements of all the cool stuff around you and make them your own. You can’t simply imitate the coolest person you know or have heard of. And cool certainly isn’t being standoffish with holier than thou complex. That’s just being a douche; another term I happened to meta-analyze last semester. I come from New York City, where every hipster and entitled beautiful person thinks their *expletive* don’t stink. Where saying hello to someone you’ve met once upon a time is a form of acquiescence to his or her superiority. Where waiting in line for an hour only to be told you can’t get in unless you buy a bottle (usually of the Grey Goose persuasion) is a prerequisite for a cool night. I love my hometown, and it may be the coolest city in the world, but none of what I’ve described is cool. I mean, it is only in the sense that the places you have to wait an hour to get into are really sweet, but it’s also exclusive, self-interested and haughty. In many ways, unfortunately, those are the characteristics that cool has come to be associated with.

When considering what cool means to you, think of Andre Balázs. If you don’t know who he is, look him up, because he’s really cool. In all seriousness though, let cool be an influence on your life. Don’t let it be a guide, and definitely drop the front. Remember that each person interprets cool in their own way. I’m not sure that it’s meaningful to say that I’m not an expert on cool at this point given that I’ve just forced my opinion of it down your throat, but I’m not an expert on cool. With that being said, and with golden nuggets of knowledge having been dropped upon you, go forth and be cool.