What's your coolness percentage?

Mine is eighty. I am eighty percent cool.

How do I know? Back in the lovely days of Morgan Hall, apt 203, my roommate was playing around with spreadsheets. I don't know why this was entertaining, playing around with spreadsheets and pie charts. She discovered that the percentages on a pie chart didn't have to add up to 100, so she started assigning ridiculously large numbers to the slices of her pie chart. To make a rambling story short, the result of this was that my lovely roommate Kristen and I became 80% cool. It became a running joke, and why not? It's a pretty good number.

Although, to be honest, I'm probably more like 65. I'm really not that cool. I'm okay with it; I like me. But I'm pretty sure people aren't sitting around saying, "let's have a party and invite that girl who will tell random etymology facts and correct our grammar." As far as party tricks go, I got nothing.

I think I remembered this because my best friend from high school called to invite me to a friend reunion of sorts. In high school I had this fantastic group of friends, and now some of us are getting together on Saturday. I think those that are coming are mostly all still friends, still stay in touch and do things together. And most of them I haven't seen since the last time we got together, when my son was a baby. We have a history of friendship to hold us together, but the ties are leaner than they used to be.

Maybe it's because I was one of the few who moved away for college. Maybe it's because I'm not good at keeping in touch with people I don't see very often. When I see someone after a long time, all the things that have happened in that time pile up into a chasm of nothing to say. There's so much to say, but where to start? And why does it matter?


Why do I care if these people, who I haven't really been friends with for nearly nine years, still like me? I'm a different person than I was in high school. I think I'm even a better person. But I guess I'd like these people to still tell me that I'm one of them, that I still have a spot on Steve's porch swing, where four of us would sit with Nate laying across our laps because he was the smallest. We'd swing, and stare into the Hooper twilight, and swat mosquitos, and laugh. We talked about nothing, really, because we had everything ahead of us. I'm not that person anymore, but I don't want that person to not exist. I hold on to who I used to be to assure myself that I am and am not that same person. Someone who, on a pie chart once upon a time, was deemed 80% cool.