GOODBYE HIPSTER, HELLO ADULTSTER

PART TWO

While reveling in the discrimate purchase of CDs from the likes of The Strokes, The White Stripes and Wilco (key note: fairly early on), the trucker cap sits uneasily upon our head.

While not a full fledge hipster, we picked from the hipster buffet, taking the parts we wanted to add to our New England anti-prepster prepster with an edge plate; it was handmade in high school and has undergone yearly renovations, making it marginally less recognizable.

So while not appearing to look like a stereotypical hipster, with his perfect floppy haircut and corduroy jeans, we can not escape the influence of the quasi-culture on us, while at the same time wondering what we are instead?

Living in New York City and trying to make it as a writer, that makes you something. Besides broke, that is. Being around other fun-loving, hyper-aware people our age since college, that does something to you to. Besides breed complacency, that is.

But we are growing out of that clever-clever stage, that trying so hard at everything, including the art of looking like you're not trying so hard stage.

Perhaps you never get rid of that self completely - we're always going to get excited to hear that new Swedish disco-acoustic rock band. El Presidente will always taste better than Coors and reading the Sunday Styles Section over a bowl of granola in a funky cafe will never get tiresome.

While we are not hipsters, in the full aesthetic meaning of the word, we are part of something that is tied to, but goes beyond, savvy and post-modern -- an age group actively TRYing to craft a life full of meaning and non-meaning, separate from our parents, but in some way connected with our friends.

Or is it white educated youth finally figuring out the ultimate conundrum -- how to swim in the mainstream culture (where the money is) and not end up with that repulsive stink of being ridiculous.

Not as tricky a maneuver as it sounds. It's as simple as letting others know your ethos, your attitude about things. And how do you do that? Buy the first round and wear Rod Laver tennis shoes.

At this point in our lives, if you're not an overtly offensive twit, it doesn't matter what you do, how you look, or where that beer you're buying us is bought.

Two guys in a dive bar on Stanton Street-- discussing Kafka? discussing politics? or discussing the new episode of Punk'd?

What happens when the ideas -- the curiousity -- they recede, or if you will, are trampled by the hardships of survival, when hyper-savvy media awareness and an asymmetrical eighties hairdo is all that remains?

Discontentment, of a spiritual and not a practical nature, sometimes we actually miss thee: letting us know that the difference between the hipster and the writer with hipster tendencies is not the attitude, but the weight one places on their denim jacketed shoulders.