My Growing Estrangement from Being Cool

I used to be cool.

By most standards, at least. I would even say that this variable, to which I will refer as the "cool factor," is part of what won my wife over when we were in high school. It was that combination of nonchalant indifference married to a calculated charm that made me cool back then.

Today, however, I am an altogether different story. Today, I am a dork.

I presently sit typing this blog in a public location () wearing a shirt I bought for my honeymoon over 13 years ago. I can't imagine any shirt survives the fickle fashionistas for 13 straight years. What is playing in my headphones? Well, R.E.M. of course. I am talking "Automatic for the People" R.E.M. That's not even college radio R.E.M., it's middle-aged R.E.M.

In college, I was a Comparative Literature major. I spent years analyzing James Joyce, Tolstoy and Ezra Pound. There wasn't a book on my shelf that couldn't be described as profound, paradigm-shaping or just generally impressive. Today, I read science fiction, fantasy, comic books and a boat load of theology.

Dork.

All of that and I haven’t even gotten started on film. While I once watched Indy-Avant Garde-Art House flops that were acclaimed, depressing and scarcely watched except by the intelligentsia, today I want corny, happy and entertaining. Give me hero movies. Give me feel-good. Give me super powers, explosions, and neat, tidy endings.

Dork.

I go to concerts at Western Avenue Elementary School and take a hundred pictures of my kids singing, playing the xylophone, or starring as an Emperor Penguin in a 10-minute play. I sit with soccer moms and dads discussing weather, real estate tax, and the gentrification of Chicago. And to top it all off, instead of becoming the Peace Corps. Revolutionary, to which I aspired in high school, I became a suburban minister instead.

Dork.

And yet I am more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have been. I strive for no greater identity than the one I have. At one point in the Gospel of John there is a narrative where Jesus explains that he has come "to give life, and to give it to the full" (John 10:10). I once had a lot of ideas as to what a full life was and it mostly involved romanticized notions which really only boosted my own ego.

Life is full. It's full of food fights, backyard Nerf wars, and Saturday morning community volunteer programs. Our house is a whirlwind and revolving door in which friends come and go all day while we consul, teach and scheme to change the world. We listen to Michael Jackson as we make dinner, watch the Avengers before bed and say prayers for our friends in Haiti, Japan and the Ivory Coast.

I don't have stories of evading pirates in the Indian Ocean, or building irrigation canals in West Africa, nor of presenting my theories of the evolution of Afterlife Theology to the Fellows at Oxford.

I am just a dork that has found a fulfilling life in simpler things.

So, I look on with mild amusement, low-grade irritation and no small amount of sympathy at my younger self that I see walking high school corridors and college campuses. You’ll know them when you see them. They wax poetic in coffee houses about the last book they read believing they’ve drummed up some unique insight no one else ever divined. They mock and critique everything, and they genuinely want to change things.

They spend a lot of time looking like they don’t spend a lot of time dressing themselves and they have rehearsed a cool indifference to the world around them. They denounce the commercialization of society while listening to their iPods and eating McDonald’s like the rest of us.

Yet, they are cool, there is no doubt.

I thank God for them. They keep me on my toes and force me to stay honest. They are the cynical Nathaniel’s in John 1 who ask “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” and to whom Jesus states “Here is a true Israelite in whom there is nothing false.”

And yes, while they are cool today, they are our future dorks. They too, will have kids, suffer tragedy and embrace who they truly are one day.

I will welcome them proudly to our ranks in the empire of Dorkdom.