People being cool.
Guys, Iâm going to be honest.
I want to be hip.
Iâve always wanted to be hip. I want to be exciting and interesting, and have always harboured a fear of being boring, stuffy, and [shudder] old. I want to be a cool married person and eventually a cool mom, whom young people look up to. [Of course I am breaking the number one rule of hipness by admitting my desire to be cool. What can I say. I'm hopeless].
One thing Iâve been thinking about lately is how part of being hip in our culture seems to involve being spontaneous: being able to decide at the last minute to go see a late movie or hit up a bar or club. Being hip means being impulsive, doing things without planning or forethought.
It also seems to involve doing things at night. Going to bed early is for losers and old people. Itâs hip, in contrast, to stay up all night drinking with friends or even studying or painting or doing something intellectual. Thatâs what artists and thinkers do. We feel edgy and important when we party or work late into the night. We praise those who âburn the midnight oilâ and feel just a tad cool when we admit to having insomnia.
As a consequence, I think almost every young person secretly fears that marriage and kids will make them boring because then theyâll always want to go home early to take care of their overworked spouses and read the kids their bedtime stories before hitting the sack. How utterly uncool.
Iâve been heading down this path to squareness myself for years already. Iâm always heading home early. Since Iâm poor thrifty and I value regular home-cooked meals, I canât ever do spontaneous restaurant dinners. I generally like to be home by eleven so I can write in my journal before bed and be up in time to pack a balanced lunch. Also, Ben tends to be needy. He doesnât like it if Iâm out later than him.
And Iâm worried that Iâm going to get much worse, because I want to have cows someday.
I donât know if you know anything about owning dairy cows, but they need to be milked. Regularly. From what I recall from my trips to rural Mexico, they need to be milked twice a day â every twelve hours, or once in the morning and once in the evening.
Suffice it to say, you canât be super-spontaneous when you have an 800 pound mammal in your back yard needing a milking every twelve hours. No late movies, no âOh sure, Iâll stay for another drink.â Itâs home time at 8:30 sharp every night.
And itâs not just cows I want. I want chickens, too. Oh, and children. They have bedtimes and stuff, Iâm told.
To make things worse, I have also always fancied the idea of living with the rhythms of the seasons and the sun/moon/stars â going to sleep when the sun goes down, getting up when it rises, etc. I love the idea of always knowing what phase of the moon weâre at and what nights the planets will be most visible and when to expect meteor showers. It seems so natural and healthy and wholesome.
But not hip. Come to think of it, I think wholesome and hip might be opposites.
Sure, it might be cool to read about people who live with the rhythms of the earth, but not to actually do it. No one wants to hang out with someone who needs to go beddy-bye before twilight hits.
Iâm imagining myself at a party with friends and asking to excuse ourselves at 8:30 because Bessie needs to be milked and the sun is going down. Iâm imagining colleagues inviting me to join them for a beer at a quaint local pub and having to turn them down because our pregnant goat is due any day now and we need to check on her. Oh yeah and itâs almost the kidsâ bedtime.
It just doesnât sound very edgy.
Iâve been pretty square for several years already, but I fear that having kids and owning a farm would bring me down to a whole new level of fuddy-duddy. I worry that no one would even bother having us over any more because weâd have to leave just as we were reaching the groovier hours.
I donât think I have a chance of being hip if I head down this path. And so I just wonder what your thoughts, feeling and experiences are on the matter.
What do you think? Is spontaneity a prerequisite for coolness? Do you secretly kinda dislike hanging out with people who go home early, and worry about becoming like them some day? Or are you one of those people already? Do you worry about being uncool because of it?
Do I need to just accept that Iâll never be terribly hip?
Image courtesy of johnwilliamsphd