The definition of Cool/Ugly:

It started with a shirt. A sleeveless, heavy-cotton shirt with a large orange horse head on the front that I bought for $2. It looked ugly enough, but the more I looked at it, the cooler it became. It was me. When my dad saw the shirt he told me it was the ugliest piece of clothing he had ever witnessed. Oh contraire, I replied, it's so ugly that it has passed the realm of ugliness and has entered coolness.
And thus was born the term "Cool/Ugly."

It started as a joke, but it soon came to be my mantra. A pessimist by nature, I seemed only to find the ugly in my life, myself and others. But soon I saw the shimmery essence of these ugly aspects, the parts of them that were cool and beautiful. Maybe it's all about perception, or maybe it's just looking a little closer.

Cool/Ugly is about not fitting in between the margins of conformity and mediocrity. It's about being one part daring and two parts honest about who you are and who you want to be.

I never fit in. Not with any group - not within my own family - not in any pre-made sector of society. I'm too trendy for my nerdy friends, and not pretty enough for my trendy friends. The nerds are shocked I wear a dress with pearls and pumps, and the trendy ones are unimpressed because they aren't real pearls.
I'm always on the cusp and always slightly underwhelming. But I'm smart, and have some sort of talent (I think - or I'm delusional) and I'm starting to find the beauty in the little things in life - in the morning sunlight through my bedroom window, in the smell of marshmallows sealed in their plastic bag, in the feel of a cotton sweater, in a random e-mail from an old friend, in finishing a particularly great book and then sitting down to write my own.
I guess I've learned to embrace cool/ugly in my own life and deep down I'm cool/ugly myself. I can live without the label, but in a world full of labels, it's the best one I've found.