The pursuit of cool

When I started up this blog, I made one pledge to myself:

Do no harm.

Then I realised that doctors had taken first dibs on that pledge, so I came up with another one:

Be original.

Which fitted me better, and had the added advantage of leaving me open to do as much harm as I jolly well liked.

But of course I didn't really actually go so far as to think up a pledge and write it down. It was just there in the back of my mind, what I thought made a good blog and what didn't. Over the time I've imposed on myself a few rough-and-ready rules such as:

• It's not a how-to-write-a-blog site: Don't blog about blogging(oops)


• It's not a link aggregator: Don't just post links to other people's work


• It's just not a place for posting personality quiz results: "I'm the Franco-Prussian War! Find out which German War of Unification you are by clicking here!"


• It's not a diary. I don't want to write about what happened every hour of every day of my life, and I'm pretty sure most people don't want to read it.


• It's not pretty and it's not clever: I'm not a programmer, so the code will be functional rather than whizz-bang, and I'm not a designer, so it's never gonna be a Thing of Beauty.

I am, sometimes, handy with words and I think I can craft something funny when the muse comes to me. So that is what I decided to do, play to my strengths.

Hopefully it works. Rather than falling between the two stools of "aesthetically pleasing" and "technically clever", I made a third stool. A stool for putting the stuff I do on. It's my stool and I like it a lot, thank you.

You see, I realised a some time ago that I'm not cool.

Being a transvestite isn't cool, it might be interesting, sometimes exciting, and it's edging towards socially acceptable. But it's not "cool". If it was then more cool people would do it (or, at least, own up to doing it), but to a fairly great extent they don't.

Neither is having a blog (popular or not) cool. It stopped being even remotely cool sometime around the time Boris Johnson got one.

Being funny isn't cool. Comedians aren't cool. A lot of them became comedians because they weren't cool. Uncoolness is almost a prerequisite.

Being good at programming isn't cool. Even if you write AJAX code on a Mac made out of lemon-scented Buckminsterfullerine. Sorry, it just isn't.

So, the pursuit of coolness through dressing up in ladies clothes, and blogging about it in a funny way with the occasional bit of hamster-related programming thrown in for good measure... is basically pointless.

Coolness is elusive, and it is nice to achieve, but it comes to you, you can't go to it.

What's the point of this post? I don't know. It almost certainly falls foul of at least one of my rules.

It's just something I wanted to say.