COMMENTARY
Wanna share characteristics with a burrito? Be 'cool'

By Cecily Kaya

I don't understand what it entails when someone calls another classmate "cool." I mean, I hear it all over campus, and I assume that it means you're awesome in the way that burritos for lunch and canceled tests are.

People labeled in this sense are typically laid back and popular. Objects of desire are called "cool" when they're cutting-edge and trendy.

The term "cool" has even branched out to encompass Internet chatroom games ("Counter Strike"), pyrotechnic expressions (self-explanatory), acts of mass stupidity (MTV'S "Jackass") and really, really small gadgets (technology.)

It's come to the point where we've said it so much, used it so far out of context, that it's lost all tangible meaning. The possible versatility of the word can make you brain dead.

What other word in the English vocabulary can describe people, games, style, bombs, mental defects, and really, really small stuff?

From what I've derived these past three years at Moanalua High, cool is something ignorant people say to other people in order to reaffirm their place in the high school hierarchy. "Cool" is saying "what I think is the right and only way to go on a subject or else you are just so not with it."

Oh my gosh — they don't think I'm cool!

Please ... don't get your Abercrombie & Fitch panties in a knot.

High School kids are so influenced by what television, peers, magazines and pop icons have to say that many are no longer their own person. They've lost their identity.

The media is reflected in the attitude and fashion of the highly impressionable teenager, and the image that we are projecting nowadays isn't very bright for the future of America.

Cool is almost like a disease. Nothing can be called cool unless someone does it first. Others then have to look up to that person and say, "Hey! That's cool — I want to try it!"

Thus, the copy-machine effect and one by one, Xeroxes are made.

I have yet to meet a high school student who is his or her own person, who doesn't believe in what others think and couldn't care less for that matter.

If I am so lucky as to recognize this truly unique individual, if my mind, so trained on eying out the cool and trendy, does in fact realize that a real person is in my midst, then I will eat my own words.

I find that too many guys have the same clothes on, that too many girls want to be as thin as Heidi Klum, and that we all have this need to be accepted in exchange for a piece of our personality.

I 've succumbed to the wills of being cool. What is scary about this is that soon, we'll all be the same, and that we'll think it's a good thing because of the positive connotation that this one itty-bitty word bears, and the enormous impact that it carries.

I've found, after three years of high school, that cool really isn't what I want it to be.

Don't get me started on "hot."

Cecily Kaya is a junior at Moanalua High School. If you're a teen and would like to speak out about issues, trends, pressures and perceptions teens deal with, submit an article or suggest a topic to

Island Life assistant editor Dave Dondoneau at ddondoneau@honoluluadvertiser.com.