Being cool isn't getting any easier.. Yesterday's dorks turn into today's hipsters!!

It started about a year ago: People walked around campus and other social venues wearing t-shirts enticing you to "embrace your inner Geek." Then it spread to television, with larger than life celebrities declaring themselves a "Movie Geek" or a "Computer Nerd."

Now it's spread into the mainstream. Almost everybody is a geek, a nerd or a dork of some sort; whether it's movies, technology or just a general, run of the mill hipness.

When did it become so cool to be uncool? When did anybody with a passing interest in computers become a computer nerd? And why do people who got to Blockbuster every weekend refer to themselves as the resident movie geek in their circle of friends?

It used to be that geeks, nerds and the like were social outcasts, relegated to their parents' basements to plot the destruction of the world and compile lists of hated people who gave them wedgies in high school after gym class.

Now there are whole styles of coolness dedicated to losers. People with thick glasses, unkempt hair and a large cell phone are "nerd chic." They are the leaders of civilization. Women want them and former high school jocks want to be them.

It would seem that the way to a woman's heart (or a man's heart, depending upon your gender and sexual orientation) is to loudly proclaim your love of Japanese animation and your ability to program in both C+ and Visual Basic.

Which begs the question, is it now to cool to be uncool? If so, what are the current definitions of both cool and uncool? Is uncool cool and cool uncool, or are social distinctions such as these no longer a relevant issue?

How do we avoid the confusion inherent in such questions?

With the advent of the Internet, societal trends move at the speed of light. Yesterday's bellbottoms are tomorrow's Armani suits, and a combination of thick glasses and ill-fitting clothes are the mark of a person on the cusp of greatness.

The good, old-fashioned nerd no longer has a social label under which he or she can rally support. True nerds have been kicked out of their self-prescribed umbrella, forced to wander the social landscape in search of another moniker; one that is either more or less cool, depending upon what is hip at the moment.

Or maybe not. Maybe society has evolved beyond the point at which we need to label certain trends as "good" and others as "bad." Maybe we've finally made it to that utopian playground where good exists in all that surrounds us and we don't have to dunk somebody's head in the toilet for wearing the wrong brand of shoes.

Maybe coolness is just a state of being; that karmic existence where your worth as a person is defined by self-confidence and joie de vie. Clothing doesn't matter. Your love of cheesy '80s cartoons and punk music doesn't matter either. What matters is that you are at peace with who you are.

Or maybe this is just another of society's cruel tricks. Maybe cool really is uncool and vice versa. And maybe by the strange semantic shift, the ones who get lost in the mix are the true losers of society.
Who knows? Certainly not me.
I guess I'm just not cool enough... lol.. ;D

ViRal ThAkEr.