On Being a Cool Girl...

We all know the trope that Amazing “Gone Girl” Amy immortalized. "Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding."

The closest I’ve come to “Cool Girl” territory was during my improv tenure from my teens through my twenties. I’d wear jeans, plaid shirts, and ripped up converse. I was hanging out in dives late into the night after class, shows, or practice. Most important: I’d shed all femininity for the grossest, most shocking possible version of a joke, while wearing a cat eye so that the guys would still want to hook up with me.

I’ve always thought that the woman who goes to sports’ bars is a “Cool Girl” by mandate. She splits the pitcher of beer, houses the nachos and can spurt sports stats with the fluency that I think I can speak Spanish after two and a half margaritas in a cab home, except somehow, she does it as foreplay.

While I no longer put on any semblance of the act of “cool girl,” I can say with a hearty self-awareness that I cannot flirt for shit. I am an over-eager, diarrhea-mouthed idiot, who has visably blushed in front of the person of interest, literally, as recently as December. Should a guy actually pursue this smoke show, every Apple Ellipses catalyzes a practically tourettesian outburst of, ‘WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?!” My own sister saw me flirt on a vacation once when she was seventeen and turned to me in front of the guy and said, “What the ACTUAL fuck??”

I want to go into this experience shedding any preconceived prejudices not just about sports bars, but about myself. Hell yeah, I can flirt. I can talk about sports, and even the commercials during the sports. I’ll wear a cool shirt and shoes. Here’s the thing, though: the brackets have been announced, and I’ve reached out to my friends to be wing mens and wing womens. Please, tell me: does this Google Doc that will carefully plan my next several weekends and the projected types of team fans I will be interacting with look like the social calendar of a Cool Girl?

I know. Amazing Adelson, 2019