Hipster Wannabe
It’s a nice day out today, and I decided to enjoy it a little before starting work. My plan was to go out into Prospect Park and walk the full inner loop, which is something like 3.5 miles, before coming back to write. That way I would get to enjoy the nice spring day, get some exercise so I’m not atrophying at home, and still have most of the day to work. It was a good plan, except I took Zomig last night for my migraine, and that made me sleep late and have a little trouble getting going. I didn’t get out of the house until almost noon.
You never know what you’re going to get when you take a prescription drug, especially a migraine drug, for the first time, but when you feel a whopper of a headache coming on, like I do once or twice a month, you do what you’ve gotta. Zomig performed okay, I guess, though it just took me past the “searing pain” stage and into the “feels like I have a bad hangover” stage. Meh.
Anyway, I figured that it made no sense to shower BEFORE I went to the park, so I just threw on whatever I was wearing yesterday and went out. I’m having a lot of trouble with chapter 14 of THE DESERT SPEAR, which was just supposed to be a “get the characters from point a to point b” chapter, but has grown into a beehive of good ideas that I should probably not pursue as it will add 100 pages to the story. I was hoping the walk would clear my head and enable me to separate the good from the bad.
It was then, as I walked dirtily through the park in the middle of a weekday, with my re-fillable bottle of water and new beard, listening to Vampire Weekend on my iPod and thinking about what to do next in my next novel, that I realized I have officially become a hipster.
How did this happen? I never meant it to. I mean… hipsters are douchebags, right? They sit for hours in Starbucks, looking like they just rolled out of bed, sipping lattes and listening to Damien Rice while they clack away on their mac laptops. Is that really what I’ve become?
Was it societal pressure? Did I feel some unconscious need to conform to the norm of my new “work from home” lifestyle., by adopting the examples shown to me? Is it like how people start to look like their pets sometimes? Or, probably closer to the truth, the way kids tend to grow up to be what people expect of them? The weak kid gravitates towards mental pursuits and the strong one towards sports because their parents and peers unconsciously nudge them in that direction.
Is that what’s happened to me? I don’t think so… I mean, I still feel like me. I don’t think I’ve changed in any fundamental way. It more like I am just living life the way I always wanted to and couldn’t because I was spending my life in a cubicle.
But then, didn’t I conform to cubicle life, too? I had my little chotchkes on my desk; my superhero action figures and things co-workers got me as Secret Santa gifts, my personalized wall calendar and dumb cartoons pinned to the felt wall. I wasted my day on the same websites as everyone else, and had huge overlong conversations on Instant Messenger instead of working.
Ugh. Trying to unweave free will from societal pressures is almost impossible. I guess we all have that problem, no matter who we are.
I just hope that this doesn’t make me a hypocrite for mocking all my hipster friends all these years. Probably not, because it’s normal to give your friends shit (take the piss out of them, for my UK readers!), and I never meant it cruelly.
At least I didn’t try to enact a bunch of anti-hipster legislation. That’s where REAL hypocrisy starts, IMHO.
Augh! See? Only hipsters type things like IMHO!
Crap on a stick! I can’t stop!
Help!
