#something something rebellion/change comes from the ability to question authority and find individual purpose

[munadyke]

ok. sometimes I just want to listen to people talk abt star wars but the youtube results are all men and I refuse to do that to myself. found myself on a reddit thread of good sw youtube accounts/podcasts and it's like....for one dollar name a woman:/

[anjazhou-blog]

We are not for the world, the world is for us

                 Defining cool has been a quintessential cultural quest for decades: everyone wants to be cool. But what exactly is cool? What does it mean to be cool? Do rebelliousness, toughness and thrill-seeking make up the essence of coolness? Can James Dean and Faye Donaway represent the common sense of cool? Personally, I think no one could give a definite accurate definition of cool. However, although we cannot define what is cool, we can still find the common qualities of cool people and explore how these people define cool.  

                   Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous German philosopher, in my opinion is one of the coolest human beings. But why people like Nietzsche? Compared to Plato, Kant, or Marx, Nietzsche absolutely is not a simple name which is easy to remember. However, Nietzsche was the first people who bravely said: "God is dead". To understand god is dead, the first thing we need to understand is that it is not a bad thing to "kill" god because the truth is human beings do not really need god as long as we can be masters of ourselves. Moreover, Nietzsche's ultimate purpose is to criticize the social norms at that time through proposing the idea god is dead. As a lonely and romantic traveler, Nietzsche is rebellious—he declares god is dead and he fights against all the traditional values. For Nietzsche, human beings should rise above our circumstances and difficulties to embrace whatever hardship comes. In his book "beyond good and evil", Nietzsche leads people to break all the norms and jump out of comfortable zones. Being our own masters means we need to admit the importance of our own wills and desires, at the same time emphasizing individualism. The moment that all the rebellious ideas appear in our minds, we are supposed to have someone to be our mentor to the way, and Nietzsche is exactly this kind of person. For cool people, there are always some characteristics can make them stand out—something doesn't conform to social norms of the time. What makes Bonnie cool? Her nonchalant and chill expression and her gun makes her different with these girls who wear flower dress. What makes James Dean cool? His locomotive leather jacket and Harley makes him stand out in those decent men in suits and ties. What makes Angelina Jolie cool? When other little girls dream to be ballet dancers, she wants to be a vampire. And her rebellious madness and boldness, her brave attitude in face of disease, and her brilliance of motherhood in face of children all make her an extraordinary woman. What makes Kurt Cobain cool? He'd rather be himself and be detested by others than changing himself to please other people.

                   What coincide with Nietzsche's ideas is the definition of cool given by Pountain and Robbins's book Cool Rules: cool is an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance to authority. In other words, cool people are those who refuse to be sheep and they pursue everything they want through struggling. However, from Cool Rules, being cool forms part of risky series of negotiations about becoming an individual while still being accepted into a group, which means being cool doesn't equal to being weird. There should be an obvious limit between cool and weird. But what is the limit? To answer this question, I choose to look at the three requirements of being cool mentioned in Cool Rules—narcissism, ironic detachment, and hedonism. Firstly, narcissism means an exaggerated admiration for oneself, which gives rise to the feeling that the world revolves around you and shares your mood. Basically, this is a mood that I am not for the world, but the world is for me. Love yourself and follow your heart is always the first step of being cool. We should appreciate our parents giving birth to us but we are not supposed to live as they wish, and what we need to do is to figure out who we are and who we want to be, facing our desires and pursing dreams by all means. Never look back and never regret. Although some people consider narcissism as a sin of vanity, I personally think we should have an aggressive attitude toward our spirit of narcissism. Being aggressive when our pursuits and dreams are denigrated, and there's nothing wrong with being ambitious if at the same time we can be responsible for our behaviors.  

                   Secondly, ironic detachment is a stratagem for concealing one's feelings by suggesting their opposite. Philosophers divide irony into several types, but cool irony is a combination of different types of irony, making it a verbal weapon effective in aggression. For me, ironic detachment is the state of not being fully part of a specific scene due to that appreciation of life. Some people consider the world as a huge vanity fair and they want to constantly compete with others to win what they want. But cool people don't care. They don't want what the majority dying to get and they just want to follow their hearts. They are able to accept themselves and accept others, and they can also accept their own environment. In both the good and the adversity, they will accept everything and struggle to improve the situation. It takes a price to grow up and to be cool because growth always involves adventures, temptations and unknown things, and we should constantly try new experiences and expand our personal limits.

                     Last but not the least, hedonism is the simplest but also the most complicated cool quality. Literally, hedonism means we should simply seek pleasure and enjoy everything. However, cool hedonism is always driven by some ambitious motivations. This is a kind of pleasure from physical gratification, the excitement of competition or the charm of anticipated success. From my point of view, the pleasure that is too easy to get is not real pleasure. I think that hedonism refers to inner enjoyment, but not pure material pleasure. Some people think that the pursuit of material needs all kinds of abilities, but the pursuit of inner enjoyment is not that demanding. However, the pursuit of inner enjoyment is the hardest. Inner enjoyment is a combination. Things like food, money, sex are pleasure, at the same time reading, listening to music, watching movies, thinking, and debating are also pleasure. We need to combine different pleasures together to understand the true meaning of hedonism.  

                  In addition to the three characteristics above, cool people also need to be complicated, which means many of their features are contradictory. In W.E.B Dubois's opinion, being black is a constant sense of having "two warring ideals" within you, and a desire to merge your "double self into a better true self." For Dubois, he calls this kind of feeling "double-consciousness". Why someone cannot be an African and an American at the same time? But also because of this kind of double-consciousness, there appeared so many extraordinary African-American artists. Like Drake, Kanye, Beyoncé, they use their lyrics to show their rebellion to the society. When I was a little girl, my cool mom told me that never let anyone label me and stop me being who I want to be. She said girls can be aggressive and ambitious rather than being kind and sweet, and she taught me that she would rather choose to reflect on the fault she made rather than regret that she didn't even choose and try. As an Asian girl, I am constantly labeled but at the same time try my best to remove all the labels and fight against the stereotype people have about "basic Asian girls". The fundamentals of being cool is to rebel through struggling: struggle to find who I am; struggle to find my own way; struggle to rebel against all the people who try to be "good" to me; struggle to fight against the weaknesses of human nature; struggle to do some seemingly meaningless and boring things to find the meaning of life; and struggle to recognize the essence of life but still passionately love life.  

                   Nietzsche didn't write "beyond god and evil" for cool; Yoko Ono didn't create her art works for cool; Isadora Duncan didn't dance for cool; Jay-Z didn't sing for cool. Then I realized that this kind of cool struggling should be meaningless and subconscious. Our ultimate purpose of struggling is not to simply be cool, but is to be a sober, thoughtful and independent human being instead of being a sheep—we need to follow our own rules instead of parents' rules, social rules or god's rules. Essentially, having a set of sound, complete and independent value system is the base of cool. Cool can be an image, a way of looking, talking or doing, but more importantly, it is a way of being.