I have owned a Nintendo DS since I was 15. In completely unrelated news, I also had not kissed a boy by that time. My raunchiest love affairs were restricted to utterly literal joysticks, reinforcing my belief that navigating the male anatomy paled in comparison to navigating Koopa Troopa Beach.
I was a disobedient 11th grader in approximately one way: I played video games in class. I didn’t cuss, I got good grades and I didn’t touch or ingest any unseemly unmentionables. But you bet your bottom dollar that I’d metaphorically serve the finger to my AP English teacher in the form of my Nintendo DS.
“Oh, you wanna talk poetry? Well I’m playing ‘Professor Layton and the Curious Village,’ so pipe down. Shakespearean ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ can wait, because solving this cryptogram is more important than your iambic pentameter, lady.”
I was truly the James Dean of digitally fortified teenage rebellion.
At a time when the majority of my friends started drinking alcohol, Mario Kart acted as my surrogate social lubricant. I may not have been doing keg stands with the guy in the puka shell necklace, but I was still bonding with the weirdoes similarly equipped with handheld gaming devices. These weirdoes (who remain my friends and who remain weird) taught me one of the most significant lessons of my adolescence: There’s a difference between being cool and being popular.
In my high school, those terms were lumped together. The cool kids were the popular kids, even if the cool kids were vilified by the majority of their classmates. For teenagers, popularity doesn’t indicate high-approval ratings. If anything, it merely denotes intrigue and in most cases jealousy. Cool kids, who were doing definitively cool things like Drugs and Sex and Pop-Rock ‘n’ roll, were dubbed “popular” just because they gave every social stratosphere something to gossip about. But calling the girl in head-to-toe Juicy Couture popular did not automatically insinuate that she was a pleasant human being.
However, and this is equally important, it didn’t imply that she was an unlikeable person either. It cannot be assumed that a heavily criticized person is a bad person. Just like it cannot be assumed that a categorically cool person is a universally adored person. My point here is that the definition of popularity is historically and pervasively blurred. This grammatical ambiguity for one word transitively distorted my understanding of another. So the meaning of cool also required clarification, if not re-characterization.
The people who really enlightened me to coolness were the very same people who taught me how to turbo boost. They were also the people who made “Hit It and Quidditch” Harry Potter tribute tees with me, the people who memorized the Ron Burgundy catalogue of pickup lines, the people whose unapologetic obsession with hot dogs induced a bounty of low-culture culinary rants. I’ve been blessed by a lot of freaks in my life.
So what if the most interesting things I did in high school were actually just being imposed on my Sims? Living vicariously is an innate human tendency that allows us to be safely standard while also acting uncommonly uncharacteristic. Some achieve this with a little technological assistance. An in-crowd wannabe is no different than an avatar-wielding geek—both seek ways to step outside themselves. And both consider the outside option to be a, so to speak, cooler alternative than their own reality. The key is to understand that living vicariously does not mean living enviously, because in most cases the object of your fixation is hardly a literal representation of what you’re in need of.
While I was riding shotgun to big daddy Donkey Kong, I didn’t actually want to be a 64-bit creature drifting in a boxcar. What I did want was an adventure. I’ve recently realized that the word adventure has been haunting me ever since graduation. I’ve even more recently realized that the word adventure has been really haunting me since puberty. As a little kid, I had no concept of cool or popular. In fact, I felt very few sentiments other than “this is fun” or “I have a boo-boo.” As kids we either laugh or cry, and the things we cry about are fleetingly forgotten as soon as we find the right adventure. As adults we let adventure become clouded by obligatory peer definitions of cool and popular. So now, in a life stage overwrought with arbitrary syntax, I can’t help but feel that I’m a couple quests short of a satisfying life.
I know a lot of weirdoes who remind me that my personal definition of cool is being silly, childlike and adventurous. I had to be reminded of this when I was 15, I still need those reminders at 22, and I fully intend to abuse Peach with red shells well into my 40s. By the time I get to Cougar Town though, I’m confident my virtual expeditions will be mere manifestations of the many real world adventures I’ll have under my belt. After all, you can’t get to the finish line without slipping on a couple banana peels!
Lindsay Tomson, Trinity ’12, is currently applying her Duke-developed skills of sarcasm and awkwardness in the real world. Her installation of the weekly Socialites column runs on alternate Wednesdays. You can follow Lindsay on Twitter @elle4tee.
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