Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Hipsters Don't Care

Bestest Friend sent me a link to an article on CollegeMagazine.com naming the "10 Most Hipster Campuses."

Is this still considered a rude gesture?
It's been a while since college.
 Sorry, but this has "suspect" written all over it. First of all, "CollegeMagazine.com" is the worst name ever for a publication, or a website, or whatever it's supposed to be. I'm guessing it was the result of a dare, or a hungover editor..."Whatevs, dude, it's eleven a.m. and I'm still fucking wasted, call the damn thing 'CollegeMagazine.com' for all I care." It's like having a newspaper called, uh, "Newspaper."

You can be literal and still be classy.
Second of all, this article shows that the mainstreaming and subsequent neutering of "hipsters" as a subclass is now complete. Like greasers, hippies, preppies, punks, goths, and emos before them, they've been named, classified, and declared cute by suburban moms. They're over. Can we all start buying sweaters that fit properly now?

And pants, maybe?
Third of all, the term hipster is not supposed to be a badge of honor. Remember when the term "politically correct" started being bandied about 20 years ago? It was a derisive description for a certain kind of hypocrisy that manifested itself in statements that struck the right tone but were empty of meaning. The Left used it against the Right, and the Right used it against the Left, and everyone agreed that it amounted to paying lip service to voting constituencies without committing to any productive plan of action. Then somebody - Bill Maher or some asshat like that - decided to started calling himself "politically incorrect," as if it were better to not even pretend to be sensitive to people you didn't like. Once that caught on, suddenly all the folks who prevously took offense at being called PC decided that if the alternative was to be un-PC like those commie pinko perverts, they would appropriate political correctness as the cool thing to be. And then the two sides swapped positions a couple of times, and now the term political correctness has been squeezed dry of any relevance and you don't want to go to any parties with anybody who still uses it.

Hipsters, welcome to your future.

I'm getting two of them.
 So yeah. Clearly this list wasn't compiled by any "hipsters." Hipsters don't make lists. That's so linear. Hipsters are all about the cloud, whatever the hell that is. Also, hipsters don't advertise where they hang out. They totally want you to know. But they're not going to tell you. They want you glean it organically.

Organic is cool. Whatever organic is.
I mean that sincerely, by which I mean ironically.

Besides, universities don't create hipsters, any more than degrees create jobs. Anyone who chooses a institution of higher learning based on its proportion of fedora-wearing poseurs to real people probably deserves $100K in student loans and no freaking idea how to act like a grownup in a job interview.

Dude, I don't need your faceless corporate greed.
Just a 1:1 401(k) match and first-day benefits.
 As a sidebar, Bestest Friend graduated from one of the top-10 hipster schools herself. She is not a hipster. She listens to music she actually likes, and I'm pretty sure she never smoked a clove cigarette.

I did not attend any of the top-10 hipster schools. My alma mater has a renowned engineering department and a nationally-ranked chess team. I'm pretty sure the nerdly force field around my school would crush any hipster that tried to enroll - oversized glasses, secondhand lumberjack hats, and all. Ironically - you know, actually ironically, it has a real definition, you should look it up sometime - I was a liberal arts major at my un-hipsterish university, which probably made me one of the coolest people there. And all the nerds who graduated with me probably hold a dozen patents in nanotechnology each and are rich. I'm sure I had a point, but now I'm pissed off.

Sooooo pissed off. Whatevs.
 Anyway, read the article to see if your past, present, or future school is infested with the tragically hip. And don't forget the comments section. You can almost see the sneeer on their latte-foam-covered lips.

Whatevs.

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