Hipsters and Retards

In this New York Magazine article, Chuck Klosterman says in response to how nerdy guys get girls, "You used to be able to tell the difference between hipsters and homeless people. Now, it's between hipsters and retards. I mean, either that guy in the corner in orange safety pants holding a protest sign and wearing a top hat is mentally disabled or he is the coolest fucking guy you will ever know."

Today, Farrah, Sarah, and I were talking about movies. I admitted that I liked Save the Last Dance on a very fundamental, visceral level (my favorite line, when a tertiary character emphatically declares, "I don't got no 10.0 GPA"). Sarah had enjoyed all three Bring it On Sequals (Bring it on Again, One More Time, and Let's Milk this Cash Cow for All its Worth). Farrah was a teen movie veteran as well, having watched parts of the Prince and Me 2: The Royal Wedding, while secretly wishing a Dutch prince would sweep her from her life of Midwestern drudgery. Empirically, this may seem tragic and quite pathetic that we relished watching the so-bad-it's-good genre.

Because on one hand, this could be the saddest thing you had ever heard (that I actually liked the shows on ABC Family). But it could also mean something else entirely - that we were slacker cool, which is fundamentally ironic because medical school beats the slacker out of even the most unwilling lazy ass.

After this movie conversation, I realize that I had the potential to fit into Chuck's proposed dichtomy of "hipsters" and "retards." So, I posed this question: were we the type of people who don't do much with their lives but have a wealth of knowledge on arcane topics such as famous art heists and the career of B-list actors like Johnnie Lee Miller? Were we armchair philosophers? The "coolest fucking guy you will ever know," and cultivating this inherent hipster coolness, and all the while, sitting on our asses in our La-z Boy armchairs and rotting away beneath a pile of old Entertainment Weeklies and New Yorkers and bags of artificially flavored Doritos.

Anyone who fit the mainstream criteria of coolness would deem having an intimate knowledge of famous art heists, for instance, "retarded" and decidedly uncool. Because cool within the mainstream stems from going to the hottest bars/clubs, drinking chic shots, and mastering the art of random hook-ups. (Notice how I lack even the adequate language to express the terms of mainstream coolness, so far removed am I from that world). These individuals looked down on grimy hipsters with an air of disdain as they wear strange black and white stripe flats that don't match with anything (Farrah) or read the latest revisionist treatise on the Feminine Mystique.

At the same time, though, maybe Chuck has a point, or at least I hope I'm the "coolest fucking guy you will ever know," and not some tragic slacker anachronistically left over from the early 90s, fulfilling the prototype of the greasy, disillusioned, Gen-Xer, scowling at corporate greed and filthy consumerism as my yuppie friends put down a down payment on a NYC brownstone.

--By Mariam, whose journey to North Carolina was as torturous as Inman's in Cold Mountain.