Cool is a biproduct. As is Cool Whip, I believe.

There may be no greater insult one can throw at a person with kids than to call them a "cool parent." It's become a wretched cliche', mostly because the stereotypical "cool" parent is abut as far from actual cool as you can be.

Cool is an interesting word when used to describe a person. It's an adjective that has really not changed in connotation as almost every other non-specific descriptor has over the years. Words have gone in and out of style and shifted meaning but not cool. And I'm going to stop using italics or quotation marks now because it's annoying, so you'll have to figure things out from the context.

I think the biggest reason for this consistency is that it's a word that you only attach to someone else. Nothing is less cool than calling yourself cool, and trying to be cool is a close second. If you're deciding how to behave based on a desire to be cool (which means in turn to be seen by others as being cool), you are decidedly not cool. This is a universal truth and it's why even the coolest teenager is only cool when compared to other teenagers, because really, is there a teenager alive who never thinks about how others perceive them? One of the defining characteristics of adolescence is that at that age people are trying to figure out how they related to those around them, which makes their behavior intentional, and intentional isn't cool.

So that's the conundrum. People aspire to be cool, but the act of attempting to be cool is almost by definition uncool. Silly as this sounds, there are important conclusions to be drawn from this. It means, first of all, that you can't control how other people see you. Thus in in turn implies that your only shot at it is to be yourself.

This is harder than it sounds. Accepting yourself for who you are is one of the most difficult things a person can do. Accepting means accepting your limitations, which we are brought up to try to overcome. Self-improvement, that's the way to go. It can only take you so far. I want to be neat and organized and I prefer having things clean, but I can never make it happen. So I'm inclined to accept that I'm just messy and disorganized. But my wife does not accept this. So what do I do? I try to confine the mess to my own area, namely my desk.

So I guess my conclusion is that being cool can only be a biproduct of being yourself. For me, it's kind of like being nice. I seem to have acquired a reputation for being nice. This is nothing that I ever aspired to be. I never do things to try to be nice. What I do try is to be a good person, by my own specific measure for that sort of thing, and nice seems to be a biproduct of that.