Irony of Ironies

Making fun of hipsters is even more old hat than hackneyed cliches.  Everybody does it - even, I'm sure, hipsters, whatever that means in the ever-expanding circle of satire.  Why yes, I've indulged in it on here, but even that glowing endorsement doesn't fully refresh the years of mockery.  Nonetheless, today I am here to talk about hipsters.  Sort of.  Please note that I said "talk about," not "make fun of;" first, because this is more a kvetch than a sarcasm, and second, because  I'm a skinny white guy who lives in Oregon, drinks a lot of coffee, and runs two blogs.  That's gotta be a few hundred Hipster Points right there, even if my knowledge of obscure indie bands desperately needs polishing.*

Crap, I promised not to make fun of hipsters, didn't I?  Yeah.  Okay, moving on!  Quite frankly, I have no problem with people wearing plaid, or skinny jeans - no, most people can't pull off the latter, no pun intended, but hey, it's none of my business.  Nor is gloating about their obscure tastes in music.  Definitely pretentious, but  pretension, unfortunately, seems to go hand in hand with youth and most hipsters aren't much older than thirty, and usually more toward their teens or early twenties.  By the time they hit forty, they're just music snobs.  Even the fake glasses and the blatant cultural appropriation...all right, so those are irritating as a persistent mosquito but hipsters, unfortunately, can hardly claim a monopoly on ridiculous posturing or cultural imperialism-fuelled insensitivity.

Nah, what bugs me is the so-called irony, and not even for the reasons you might think!  Sure, it's a terrible bastardization of the actual literary concept of irony but, since I'm not seeing it in writing and the self-awareness of a lot of the people using it catapults it straight into the realm of the absurd I just kind of leave it alone, like a janitor ignoring Cthulu meditating in the middle of the hallway.  Yeah, the janitor gets paid to clean the place and, yeah, Cthulu is really, immensely, incredibly not supposed to be there but there's basically nothing the janitor can DO about him and if they pay him too much thought they'll go completely nuts.

Where were we? Oh! Right.  Hipster faux-irony.  The profoundly frustrating thing about this is that I'm a nerd, which probably seems irrelevant until you consider what "nerd" really means.  I've never worn a pocket-protector in my life, my trousers are quite long enough, thank you, and I spend a good five hours outdoors every day hiking in a hilly town, toting a large sack of papers...buuuut I learned Elvish in high school and can wax eloquent on the cultural relevance of Sir Terry Pratchett's oeuvre, or the influences of Buddhism and multiculturalism in Ursula K. Le Guin's writings.  A nerd, at heart, is someone who cares passionately about things - even odd things, even obscure things, even things that are "just" stories.**

At first glance, this affinity for the peculiar and unknown seems to put nerds in league with hipsters.  However, much  like love and hate, life and death, dark and light, these two are opposites inextricably entwined.  A hipster finds something obscure and they wear a tee shirt with its logo or something.  Or they find something they know is weird or in bad taste or whatever, and do the same, or get a pin from it, or...you know what I mean.  They're self aware about it.  Nerds, while plenty of us don't lack self-awareness, do lack the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, look-how-smart-I-am-for-mocking-this mentality.  We aren't mocking our peculiar interests, not because we don't know they're peculiar but because this doesn't diminish or increase our love for them, it's just part of our love for them.

Even this digression would just be something that exists -  not something I particularly enjoy, but none of my business, either, were it not for the fact that it leads to accusations of hipster-dom (which I'd receive anyway, most likely; please see the "skinny white Oregonian with blogs" thing) and of over-thinking.  Neither of these is actually harmful, and the conviction that people passionate about stories and oddities overthink the world around them and/or have their heads in the clouds has probably been around since the dawn of our species. It's less a subculture thing than a culture thing.

These things may not be harmful, but they do get annoying.  Sure, they may be true, but didn't most folks learn in kindergarten that just because something is true, doesn't mean you have to say it?  Tact, people.  It may save your life.

After all, I wear the One Ring.  Don't mess with me.

*And by "polishing," I mean "existence."

**This, too, is destined for a post of its own.