If you want “to play it cool,” you would be “cool” something like this. If you are still sufficiently old fashioned to invite people into your home for an informal, intimate dinner and relaxed evening, “get with it and get cool.” This is to expose yourself to their coming to know you the way you live. That’s not “cool.” You want people to know you the way you want them to know you. Moreover, you can’t get rid of them when they get too close to you without being socially impolite by throwing them out.

So, invite the person to meet you on neutral ground, such as in a public restaurant. You can, then, decline to be forthright with the argument others might overhear. Also, if things get too intimate, you can anxiously look at your watch and exclaim, “Gotta go!” You are under no obligation to indicate why.

It’s even cooler to phone the person. This way, your facial expression and gestures can’t betray you. You can say “Gotta go!” here, too, but the advantage is you don’t gotta go.

You can be dramatic about this. Knock something over and scream, “I gotta emergency. Call you later!” Of course, you don’t need actually to call later. If caught, you can always claim “I forgot.” People forget, don’t they, and you can’t be held accountable for forgetting. If you really can’t forget and aren’t willing to lie about it, you can make yourself forget.

You can use e-mail—any time you find it convenient without caring about the other person’s convenience. If you feel obliged to say something but don’t know what to say (or aren’t willing to say what you want to say or should say), you can insert those little emoticons. If in reply, the person objects to the emotion signaled, you can always get out of this by claiming “My bad. I never did understand those little thingies.”

Another advantage of e-mail is when you want to ignore a question asked. In person or on the phone you have to say something, and you run the risk of not thinking of something clever enough. You just might blurt out the wrong thing, e.g., the truth. If you don’t want to reply, you can always claim your computer was down.

So, e-mail might not be the coolist thing. You can go back to telephones—but don’t use landline-to-landline. Use cell phones. Try to plan it so you’re both driving in heavy traffic. If someone sees you so, they will think you are an importantly busy person, much in demand. This is cool—especially if you hold someone up in traffic, because they can get a better view of your busyness.

Here, too, your have that convenient “Gotta go!” Only, now it sounds as if you are a responsible driver. Actually, though, this isn’t so cool.

What is cool is to be an adventurous driver—one who is willing to take risks, like you see in video games. The real advantage of cell-phone-in-traffic is you can claim your listener didn’t get it because she was paying too much attention to traffic and not enough to what you were saying.

Better than e-mail or call phones is texting. You don’t need to say as much. In point of fact, what you send doesn’t need to make sense at all. You tried and that’s enough.

The specific value of texting, however, is you can intrude into whatever the other person is doing and distract him from what he should be doing. Now, that’s cool.

Coolist of all — and are you ready for this? — is Twitter! (Whatever that is.)

“Cool”: relax and be happy. Don’t let anything bother you or take anything seriously, Dude.