Calling someone a poser (or poseur, for that added flair of
pretentiousness) was one of my favorite insults growing up. I considered myself
very Catcher in the Rye – blowing my whistle at people I thought were phonies,
a fact which I embraced with no sense of irony at all. Looking back I realize I
was the poseur, desperately trying to be something I was not: cool.
Mercifully the years have softened my name-calling
tendencies, along with my sense of hipness (or lack thereof, clearly
illustrated by my use of the word). I now consider myself to fall squarely on
the uncool side of things. (Frankly, I don't even know where the line is drawn
anymore. I simply assume that I am not within her borders.) And I am cool with
that.
I was reminded of this on a recent evening's entertainment. Ira
Glass, host of This American Life, was touring the states and brought his show
to Kansas. I bought my tickets back in January and had been looking forward to
it for five months. The night of the show I was as giddy as a tween at a Justin
Bieber concert. (That's a thing, right?) Ready to burst, I was mentally
chanting "Ira! Ira! Ira!" My swooning was all intellectual - my
passion not for Ira himself, but for stories well told, ideas sparked,
connections forged. So nerdy, right?
Maybe it's cool to like This American Life. Maybe it's not.
I can say it's a relief to no longer care. It's freeing to
simply like what I like and not worry about what it says about me.
Like a well-worn grove in a beloved chair, it's a kind of settling in to
myself. I do my best to just sit back and relax – to live within the
borders of Julie. It's a land where there is no line drawn between nerdy and
cool, a land where you embrace who you are. I hope my flag can fly high as a
beacon to others: Drop your defenses and join me. All are welcome here.
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE This American Life, and I would have been chanting and swooning righ there with you. Was it everything you hoped it would be?!
ReplyDeleteI think once you get out in the big, wide world, where there are so many different measuring sticks of status, instead of the first most of us are exposed to: Nerd vs. Cool, you eventually realize that even if you're at the quintessessence of desirablility (super cool, ultra rich, breathtakingly sexy, brilliant beyond words) to one group, that group will always be outnumbered by others who couldn't care less how far you are up the ladder in that one area. That kind of takes the pressure off a bit and allows you to become whoever you really want to be, right? And really, now we're all past our twenties (and some of us past our thirties), we should be realizing that we don't have so much time that we can afford to throw it away by wasting it on opinions of people who probably don't really matter in the long run... Just my two cents' worth...