"You can always judge a man by his shoes."

This was once uttered to me by a colleague. I'm sure she said it because, looking down at my feet, she saw that I was a a Miu-Miu stiletto-wearing fashionista and expected me to agree. I am proud to say that I did not - she was looking at the wrong shoes to guess my feelings about men and symbols of cool. She should have been looking at my then-husband's shoes - Florsheims! Three years old and looking like old baked potatoes. He chose shoes for comfort, put them on and forgot about them until they developed holes in the soles. Then he went out and bought another pair of baked-potatoes-in-the-making. He wore Gap khakis, too. The kind with pleats. With dark socks.

To this day I think he is one of the coolest people I've ever known - and anyone who knows him thinks this too. He's brilliant, has a wonderfully strange sense of humor and owns a vast and killer music collection. He is smarter than almost everyone around him but few people realize this - he feels no need to show his knowledge off. If he can't find something nice to say about someone (rare) he chooses not to say anything - he listens instead (more rare).

He was (is) one of the few truly confident people I have ever known - a confidence that came from deep within, unaided by yoga or being a vegan or any other pseduo-enlightenment claptrap (no offense to earnest but not-too-earnest practitioners thereof). He fits many stereotypes - e.g. a midwestern guy who eats meat and likes beer and televised sports - but he is none of them. He just has this sense of self, this core being, that most people just don't seem to have. I learned a lot being married to him. I (hopefully) stoppped being such a pain in the ass about symbols of coolness, uniqueness, acceptability. With him as a role model of just being, I became my authentic self. Looked down one day and realized my shoes, though for many undoubtedly more 'cool' than my husband's Florsheims, were ultimately just shoes.

A man is not his pants. A man is not his shoes. A woman - like the LW - who wonders/thinks otherwise probably IS her pants and shoes. Wakey wakey! Time's a wasting! Turn that critical eye inward. Get some new friends - even some with (gasp) uncool shoes and pants and hair - people who pay less attention to their outsides often have the most fascinating insights (not always - but often). Read more - think about what you read. You don't have to talk about it - just thinking about it is fun and rewarding. Spend some time learning how to get really good (not competitive) at something - knitting or running or painting or cooking. The process of learning, honing and perfecting some small skill can be very reflective and introspective, if you let it.

Cool isn't something you consume or acquire. It's something you become from the inside out.

(sorry for the repost - somehow my first sentence was cut off, making it sort of hard to figure out what I was talking about)

BTW really like what one poster said about hipsterism vs. poseurism. And the 'behind every khaki-wearing engineer' philosophy was right on - engineers (some of them, anyway) are weird individualists - they rock! And as for living in the suburbs - that's what Travelocity and Orbitz are for. Suburbs are for returning to after experiencing excitement somewhere else.