Be Cool

April 10, 1999

s with any fun game—especially Monopoly—there must be winners and losers; if a game didn’t have a loser to be shunned and mocked, it wouldn’t reflect society. Thus, the modern teenager must conform to fit in. However, you know somebody is cool if they excel in the following fields.

FASHION

Image is everything. You must present yourself as a current and informed consumer; the best way to do this is to give clothing companies all of your money to put their labels across your chest. Who needs an identity when you can buy one?

MUSIC

Multibillion-dollar record corporations have given us all the privilege of listening to the same exact type of music, and therefore nobody ever needs to disagree. If everyone could just listen to the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, we could finally reach the national unity our forefathers dreamed of.

And, as no trend can last forever, our friends at the record companies will also do us the favor of alerting us when we are tired of a specific type of music, and let us know what to listen to next. We have it made!

GOSSIP

We live in America, where celebrities are more important than people who actually do something beneficial for society. Always be informed about who the current teenage celebrities are, even though teenage celebrities usually have a career spanning the amount of time it takes for them to defecate.

If you are caught in a situation where you have to look informed but aren’t, this can be accomplished quite easily, as almost every teenage celebrity uses their first, middle, and last names (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, John Wayne Gacy), so just invent a name like “Becky Ray Cusack” and immediately question whether her thingies are real. Whose are anymore?

SCHOOL

School is where you will be given information. You will be fed with it like a baby is fed with weird peach crap. You will accept all of the presented curriculum as the truth, and you will not search for your own truths. A standardized education makes you a standard person, and being different is not cool. Also, be sure to only speak in monosyllabic words. Of course, “monosyllabic” has five syllables, but why the hell would you need to know that?

ALCOHOL

Being incapacitated and smelly and dangerous and stupid really impresses other incapacitated and smelly and dangerous and stupid people, and therefore you should stay drunk all the time. If this begins to interfere with your life, it simply means you have one.

Yes, the popular kids are better than us, and we must aspire to reach their level of perfection. The way to do that is to suppress our individuality and conform to the standards of everybody else. It’s called superficiality because that’s precisely what it is: SUPER!!!!