You guys, I just want to be cool. Like, I thought that coming to Yale would help me be cooler because there would be fewer cool people here and the type of people who thought I was cool in high school were disillusioned English teachers in their late 20s and I thought that Yale students would be closer to that kind of person and that I would find my niche or whatever. I really did think that. But it turns out that at Yale you have to be cool AND smart. Smart but not douchey, I mean.

So I got here as a freshman or whatever and I’m like, wait a minute: every1 @ Yale is 2 kewl 🙁 I couldn’t even be cool after I started using Internet slang ironically. Plus I realized no one reads my tweets anyway so it doesn’t even matter what kind of slang I’m using.

After three years, though, I think I’ve finally found my thing. The thing that’s going to make me cool. It’s called “going to Europe for 5 months and coming back with a tattoo in a fairly visible place and big red hipster glasses and a British boyfriend who rolls his own cigarettes.” I’m writing this article for WEEKEND because I want everyone who didn’t already know to know that I did these things and am cool now. I feel that it will expedite the cool-transitioning process. Also it might help me get more Twitter followers, which might be a cause or effect of being cool. I don’t know.

Anyway, let’s talk about the tattoo thing because that’s the most universally cool thing you can do, I think, except for maybe one of those weird acronym drugs that everyone’s always doing, like LSD or MDMA or RSVP or something. I’m way too scared to try those, though, so it’s irrelevant.

Knowing that I went to Europe for that long, you probably assume that I had some life-changing experience that inspired me to get the extremely symbolic-looking-but-actually-meaningless-and-slightly-asymmetrical-not-on-purpose-but-oh-well-it’s-permanent “ink” that I’m now “sporting” on my left wrist. However, you’d be wrong. And since we go to Yale and value intelligence and stuff, being wrong makes you less cool than the person who is right, i.e. me, i.e. I’m cooler already.

But I’ll still tell you about how I got the tattoo because everyone is really curious about my life now that I’m cool and mysterious and stuff. I realized that I was entering the twilight (OMG HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEW TRAILER?!?!) of my college years and that if I wanted to take advantage of the best time of my life to impress others with my brazen tattoo-having abilities, I’d better get it now.

I was with my girls at the club on my 21st b-day, and I was like, “YOU GUYS!!!! I WANNA GET A TATTOO!!!! LIKE, RIGHT NOW!!!!” and they were like please be quiet you’re embarrassing us and I was like “Okay. But really, WHO’S GONNA COME WITH ME!!!!!” and they were like here drink this water and then I was really sleepy.

I don’t really remember any more except that I woke up without a tattoo, and I was disappointed because I thought I wasn’t going to be cool enough to go through with getting one in the sober daytime, and as it turns out you have to be sober or at least sober-looking when you get a tattoo anyway or they won’t give it to you. I was in a real pickle.

But then I remembered that this friend of my ex-boyfriend in West Virginia does tattoos and since I was in West Virginia anyway I was like hey why not, Google says 36 percent of people ages 18 to 29 have tattoos, I wanna be part of the movement! So I just got it! It’s kind of small so it only took ten minutes or something. It felt like a tiny kitten scratching you reeeeeeeeeeeally slowly and reeeeeeeally on purpose. That’s all.

And I know what you’re thinking: YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO GET A JOB NOW, DUMMY! But obviously I don’t care what you think, because I got a permanent thing on my body that severely limits my job prospects, what of it? I am so nonchalant, and you know what nonchalant is? According to thesaurus.com, it’s a synonym for cool.