THE BOYS (aka 30+ year old Korean male)’s guide to being cool:

Being cool as a middle-aged man at my workplace is a lot like being cool in high school. It basically all comes down to the right manner of talk, the right friends, the right clothes, and the right subject matter to hiss about. Do you find yourself a middle-aged man but sadly ostracized at the office? Do you yearn for the type of shallow and fleeting affirmation only coolness can offer? Then this here is the guide for you!

1.Speak the right speak: Be Korean

This will allow you to speak exclusively in Korean with your other cool buddies no matter who may be sitting next to you or in front of you at lunch, effectively ostracizing anyone that does not speak or understand Korean. The more obnoxiously and loudly you speak in a room more heavily filled with a majority of non-Koreans the better. Tough luck if you are Chinese or White or anything else under the sun; you will not understand a single thing and no effort will be made to talk to you AT ALL. Instead you will sit awkwardly through company lunches staring at your food and wondering why everyone is laughing and if they are laughing at you. You may never know.

2. Be friends with the right people: The Boss

If the boss hates you, you are immediately and forever exempt from being cool. Make sure to be on his good side at all times, as it is he that has the final say in your job security and bonuses, but more importantly, your coolness. If deemed cool by the boss, he will help you and say cool things about you in front of everyone else. If not, he will say bad things and will not stop at demeaning, insulting, and humiliating you in front of every single person including strangers at restaurants.

3.Wear the right things: Transition Glasses

It is most imperative that you be fashion saavy and trendy in order to be cool. The hottest thing you can place on your face that will in turn make you irresistible to the 20-somethings you desire is not those nonsense aviator glasses but transition glasses. What can be hotter than something so practical? Glasses and sunglasses in one! The Wonder Girls will go wild for you. The true test of coolness is when you are loitering outside as cool boys are wont to do (extra cool points if you are simultaneously loitering AND chain smoking). Those whose glasses immediately turn pitch black are in. Those whose glasses remain clear… are out. Pair these babies with a shapeless pastel-colored company logo shirt with high-waisted pleated khakis and you are good to go. Cool as a bean.

4.Say the right things: Hate your wife

It is not cool – I repeat NOT COOL – to be a middle aged man that loves your wife or even think she is remotely nice or pretty. You must hate her or at least pretend to hate her for the sake of coolness and complain, gripe, and whine about her at all hours of the work day. One’s degree of coolness is governed by the amount of griping done. Especially gripe about how she nags at you and how you hate her singing and her driving and her friends and her hair and her breathing and everything else about her. Also remember to loudly blame her for everything that is wrong with you. She is the reason why you are late to work and fat and not a billionaire and not married to your high school sweetheart. If you do not have a wife to gripe about or blame everything on, you cannot be cool. You must make haste to find a random girl online who lives in Korea and who thinks any man in America is the ticket to untold riches, marry her within three months, bring her to the states, then proceed to gripe about her the very next day (true story).