Cool Academy: 2006 Edition

7:45 a.m. used to be a very significant time. It was the reason that I set my alarm clock to 6:45 every morning, you know, because you have to account for the three snooze rule. It was the time from which I would always count back 9 hours and try to figure out the precise second I was supposed to fall asleep.

So Mr. Jones, you may ask me, why was this time so important? Well you see, polite question asker, this was the time that the high school day started, 5 days a week, most weeks August through December – January through May. (Just as an aside, how’s that for interesting hyphen use?) Anyway, thinking back on this magical time, I started discussing something interesting with my fellow Sometimes cohort.

We decided that we could only make generalizations about the time we were actually in high school, so for that reason, I give you: What it took to be cool in high school from 2002 to 2006.

Alright let’s get to the heart of the matter. Before going in to specifics, let me just say that in retrospect, a lot of kids met the following criteria, so give yourselves a nice pat on the back. No really. I’ll wait for a second while you do it. I wonder if right handed people and left handed people pat themselves on opposite sides of the back, or if I’m just thinking of British people. Anyway, that’s more than enough time, let’s get to the action:

1) Chewing Gum

This is the very first thing on the list, and it immediately falls into the whole square-rectangle debate. Sure, not all kids who chewed gum were cool, but you better believe that all cool kids chewed gum. To be cool, this was absolutely a non-issue. You bust out a piece of then-still-new Orbit and flash your status to the crowd. Interestingly, studies that I invented show this as right around the time when everybody realized that Juicy Fruit was 5 for 25 cents for a reason, which showed that just as with any status symbol, the more you spent on your gum, the fresher you and your breath were.

2) Texting
Text messaging has pretty much entered the everyday lives of the vast majority of the American high school public. You have to remember though, this is the early 2000s we’re talking about. This was like having AIM in 4th grade and actually choosing to have your friends call you prairiebabie88 – only the cool kids did it. Girls hid it by laying their purses open on their desk, guys used the hoodie technique. The bottom line was, if you texted in high school, you were a somebody, you coulda been a contender.

3) Not giving a hell about passing period
Even with the allotted 6 minute time frame to get from point A to point B, if you lingered by the lockers and talked to a girl – especially about another girl – you had arrived. Hell, if you did anything that caused you to walk into your next class even a minute late, notebook in hand pressed against your forearm, to your punctual classmates, for that brief moment in time, you were a cool kid.


4) Drinking
This is the absolut end all criterion. Literally, it is the single most important key to being popular in high school. If at any point during your high school career you consumed alcohol in any vain, fuggedaboutit, you’re golden. If I teach my kid anything, it’ll be the lesson that drinking in high school makes you a cool kid. Even if you weren’t part of the Zack Morris-esque group of kids, if you drank in high school, you shared a common, cross-clique bond with your fellow cool kid brethren. So hold your head high in that regard.

Again, I think it’s best to restate that these particular set of traits can only be vouched for in the era when Michael Vick was the best thing to happen to Madden, and girls thought jeans without pockets in the back were fashionable. So let this post be a bit of nostalgia for you fine folk, and let you carry you over till the end of your week. Oh and if you didn’t meet any of the requirements, you can always try out for the math team. Seriously, those kids were champions at Naperville North.

Hope you dugg it kiddies,

Tapan Jones