I am not cool…

At age 51, it’s time to give up the hope of EVER being cool.

Yes, I admit, I have been a coolness wanna be for far longer than I would like to admit. I have sought after the mantle of hipness, wanting to hang with the the cutting edge kids who are pushing the limits and riding the trend waves of society. But in spite of the occasional facial hair, the sarcastic and witty repartee and being a technological innovator, I officially declare that there is little chance that I will be a hipster.

The lack of coolness was confirmed for me several times this week.

The first was as I was laying on a table with a staff full of medical professionals looking at pictures of my colon while I was trying to act as if everything is normal. Trust me . . . there is nothing at all cool about the 50 year old screening colonoscopy. There is no way to affect any sort of hipster cool when one is running to the bathroom every ten minutes the day before while getting ready, nor during the actual event itself (I’ll spare you the gory details).

But the second rejection of coolness was seen yesterday when I opted of my own accord to not purchase a Mac, but instead went with an Asus U46 series laptop instead.

Yes, I know that Macs are better. Yes I know that they have a certain cachet that rubs off on the owner, bestowing him or her with that special status that identifies them as someone special. Yes, I know that the premium paid for owning one of Steve Jobs magical mystery machines is worth the extra expense accruing coolness points.

And yes, I know, that ANY Windows machine is pretty much the equivalent of a 2033 GMC pickup truck.

But you know, I loved my little GMC pickup truck. It wasn’t sexy. It didn’t glow in the dark. But it worked. It did what I needed it to do – in the same way that this Asus machine does what I need it to do.

And honestly, it has the same processor as a Macbook Pro. It has a motherboard built by Asus, just like a Macbook Pro. Not, it doesn’t have the special sauce that makes an Apple product what it is . . . but then again, it was about half the price of a Macbook Pro with 8 gigs of ram and a 750mb hard drive.

I hate to say it – for I recognize the genius of Apple – but for many owning one is not that different from driving a Lexus or a Mercedes . . . a statement of one’s coolness and wealth. And really, shouldn’t a computer be a tool for getting things done – not a status symbol?

I know . . . I hear the Apple guys revving up the engines. “Mac’s work better,” they say. “OS 10 empowers users while Windows gets in the way.” “Macs are better for right brained people in that they are simple to use and facilitate creativity.”

I hear ya. There are some things on the Mac side that I wish we had in Windows world – mainly things like GarageBand, and an ITunes that doesn’t hog system resources the way it does in Windows. Yes, the ease of interconnections of an Apple environment is wonderful, and I have to work a bit harder to get things to interconnect due to “open” nature of the Windows environment (with MANY different kinds of hardware using the same system). But while all of that is nice, I couldn’t justify spending 50% more for the hardware, not to mention that I’m already invested in Windows software that I would have to replace in OS 10.  In the end, I couldn’t justify it.

So I admit it. I am not cool. I am not hip. And at this point in my life, I doubt that I will ever be so.