Penn kids, you're not cool. I'm sorry it has to be like this. But even my photography professor agrees. Yesterday, he quipped, "Let's face it, Penn kids aren't exactly cool and your magazine is just a little too hip for them." While you may have your hesitations about the second claim, I couldn't agree more with the first.
At Penn, our student body can be subdivided into various categories:
1. Gained weight since freshman year vs. not fat
2. Live in the high rises vs. not ugly
3. Cool vs. not cool
We are sadly under-represented in our quotient of cool. Unfortunately, this fact isn't stopping anyone from trying. There is an adage that reads, "Penn is just a bunch of nerds trying to act cool." This desire to be cool is at the heart of the Penn experience. The argument that college is different from high school because it is too large to be subjected to any sort of social hierarchy is irrelevant. Here at Penn, people still believe some sort of social hierarchy exists, albeit this time around the stakes are substantially higher. (You have to spend a lot more money on your jeans).
I can sympathize with those who actually believe that some sort of social hierarchy exists at Penn. People who live in the high rises never leave their rooms, so that rules out roughly 2,000 people. Then, you have to account for all the people who can't leave their rooms because they are chronic masturbators, and you're left with, like, 500 people. In this small subset of Penn kids who actually go out, it is not that surprising that virtually everybody knows each other. So "Six Degrees of Penn" is basically just the result of slow elevators and high-bandwidth porn.
Recently, the Internet has birthed yet another venue for people to jockey for position in the "I'm cooler than you" race. It goes by the name of Friendster™ (check out our take on the Penn version on the opposite page). I'm not on it, nor am I planning to be anytime in the near future. Partly, I'm abstaining because I don't need another means of procrastination in my life. But mainly, I don't place much faith in some site where the most annoying kid in my class has almost 300 friends. Then again, who am I to spell out the ground rules for popularity and high society? The only thing I have going for me is that I like pretty cool music. As I was informed last week by one of my friends, "You're kind of nerdy -- you like weird music." Make that 499 cool kids.
