O my dearly beloved internet, I...am a hipster.
Yep, you read that right. Me, yours truly, the guy who said something yesterday about hipster irony being an attempt to excuse simultaneous pretension and bad taste. That guy. Yeah. I'm a hipster. Double standards rock, huh?
Fortunately, I tell myself, in an attempt to console the screaming void inside, I'm a very specific kind of hipster. I own no record player and no records (though my mum does.) My closet doesn't contain a single item of plaid (though mum's has at least one. Do you think I ought to stage an intervention?) Perhaps most encouraging at all, not only do I fail to get the point of fixed-gear bikes, you'd have to pay me a pretty hefty sum to get me on a bike at all. Sure, it's absolutely lovely, til you have to go up a hill, and what then? Unless you've already been biking for a few centuries, there you go, hauling this awkward metal contraption up a freaking hill while pedestrians and drivers alike snicker into their sleeves.
And, okay, so I do hang out in cafes, but you know what? Caffeine makes the world go 'round, and furthermore, even introverts need to get out of the house for some purpose aside from work, now and then, and coffee shops are pretty much tailored to that. And....all right, yeah, I do frequent thrift stores when in need of clothing. What can I say? I'm a miser!
Shhhh.
Specifically speaking, with a high level of specificity and also maybe some specificness, I'm a word hipster - not a word purist, we went through that one yesterday, but a word hipster. Basically, if I find a word used so often it starts to lose meaning, I get fed up with it to the point that I'll go to great lengths to avoid using the accursed thing. "Random" provides a good example. Several millennia ago, during my oh-so-wonderful high school days, the incredible sophistication of teenage humour made this one of the most popular words in the English language and, as far as I can tell, it has yet to quite go away. Oh, that's so random! She's so random, it's so random, whatever and so on and so forth and you can't get AWAY from it.
Thus, in rebellion, I use "arbitrary." I say "that was a non-sequiter," or "what an out-of-the-blue comment" or "one of these things is not like the other." English is, if nothing else, chock full of options. There is no earthly reason to use one word til it falls down dead in its traces! "Random" used to be a decent word, dagnabbit, and now it's a term of last resort! What did the poor innocent word to to deserve this, I ask of you! Does it have six fingers? Did it kill someone's father?
And how about "literally?" And "awkward?" And....well, I'm sure there are more. I know there are more. This does nothing to alter the fact that I have too much blood in my caffeine system to remember 'em. I guess me, my absolutely-not-a-hipster self and I are off to get some coffee.
Regular ol' house coffee, with real milk in it.
And we're going on foot.
And not wearing plaid. Or skin-tight trousers.*
*Because the only person who should be allowed to wear skin-tight trousers is David Bowie, and we're not David Bowie, even though apparently we're Gollum now. Okay. Cool, I guess. Does that mean we get to hang out in a loincloth and eat a lot of sashimi, prrreciousss?
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