Transcending Hip:

• Does hip live in our souls?
• Does it transcend past ones attempt at financial security and social standing?
• To be hip do you need to have a skeptical attitude, not to accept anything on blind faith alone?
• Is it part of all of us as much as our body and souls?
• Can we reach in to our very depths to achieve liberation from obedience?
• Do our unemployed feel as if they have reached enlightenment, is having time on your hands to search for knowledge a blessing? 
• If you are successful are you in God’s favor?
• To have transcended suffering do you have peace, is inner peace hip?

These are the questions I have asked myself today, is hip more than materialistic and empirical, or does it go beyond. Is it something that lives inside each one of us, and we only need the knowledge that is hidden in our mind to release it?

Coded Language and "Hip"

Today at 11:45 I was asked to think of a slang word or phrase and write it on the board, four hours later and with the help of someone “in the know”, I think I have a few.

Come to find out I’m a “noob”, not only when it comes to gaming, I still can’t make the characters move in the direction I want them too, usually they end up with their faces in a wall. But I am also a noob at the blog phenomenon.

Hopefully I won’t get “owned”; or humiliated by my lack of internet savvy and this blog will become “epic”. Also, for you “squeakers” out there, I won’t post the “potty” language that kept coming to my mind in class.

The use of language can help create an identity, not only for an individual, but for an entire group of people with the same interests.

Language can also be used as power and as an aid to confuse ones parents, we suddenly become the butt of the joke, and we don’t even know it just happened. The coded language of a teenager can be harder to decipher than a T.S. Eliot poem.

But for now, two thumps to the chest and two fingers in the air, “Peace Out”!

What is a Hipster?

When I first started reading “Hip: The History” by John Leland in my mind I already had a preconceived notion of what hip meant to me.

You may have seen pictures of them, men and women in the 1960’s, lounging around in coffee shops, smoking, philosophizing, and reciting poetry, in a drug induced state. They wore their tight sweaters and berets as badges of honor to their superior intellect. The cooler than cool, the beatniks, the original hipsters.

After reading the first chapter in Leland’s book I started to question my original thoughts on the hipster.

I asked myself, is a hipster someone who drives a Prius and only buys organic foods from a wholesale store? Is it someone who leads the clothing trends that trick fairly intelligent people into buying parachute pants or skinny jeans, even when they know that neither will ever look good on them?

Or is it still that person in the coffee shop, no longer sitting there with a smoking stick of cancer, instead intently staring at an illuminated screen, typing away feverishly with satisfaction that their every thought will be read by fellow bloggers everywhere?

I don’t believe there is one clear definition of a Hipster. A hipster can be seen as a person that is looked up to for their sense of style or maybe even their knowledge. A hipster knows what is to be hip, and by the time the rest of us figure it out, he or she has already moved on to the next hip thing. Hip is an attitude and a way of speaking, it’s a style, it’s commercialism, and most of all it is personal.

By defining anyone today as a hipster have you just insulted them? Is it hip to be hip, or is it hip to be too cool to be hip?

I think the cartoon below may have it right, it is an escape from our own monotonous existence that makes one a hipster.