By Felicia Zhang

Imagine: you’re in a hole-in-the-wall cafe trying to balance on a narrow stool with spindly wooden legs, but failing because you have a bag on one shoulder and the table in front of you is too small to fit anything but your drink. Speaking of your drink, it’s served in this weird weighty earthenware bowl that you have to pick up with both hands, forcing you to either bend your neck down to take the daintiest sip or tilt your head back to take the longest draught. Which would be cool, you guess, if the chai latte they served you was not so spicy that it made you wonder if this was karma’s way of punishing you for chickening out of the cinnamon challenge that one time.

Anyway, your attention is diverted from your burning, spicy insides when this girl walks in and, right at home, plops down and orders her regular. Your quick appraisal of her sweeps from her brown striped fedora and choppy bob all the way down to her rolled-down socks and scuffed-up oxfords. Her skintight mustard pants contrast with her bulky thrift shop blazer that has so much shoulder padding that you suspect she sewed in a couple of push-up bras. She amazes you, because her outfit is so top heavy that you expect her to topple over — not balance as languidly as she does on that wretched little stool.

This all tells you one thing: hipster.

But she begs the contrary.

Ok, so she likes indie music, and ok, maybe some alternative, too; and perhaps, 50 percent of her closet was curated from thrift shops, but look, the other 50 percent of her closet is from Urban! Urban is mainstream! (Digression: Urban Outfitters is urban and trendy, not hipster). And sure, she wears mod- ‘60s sunglasses and shops only at farmers markets and mom-and-pop grocery stores; and yes, she’d rather attend a poetry slam than the movies (“Really, you’re into The Hunger Games?”), but she vehemently denies that she is a hipster. That very word “hipster” grates against her being because it codifies her way of life and erases her as an individual who enjoys what she enjoys, wears what she wears and believes what she believes. The fact that her hobbies, clothes and beliefs overlap with the hobbies, clothes and beliefs of all other hipsters, is irrelevant.

However, what bothers her the most is that individualism is what hipsterism is supposed to be all about. The hipster culture today that’s often commercialized as the young urban’s anthem is the antithesis of the old days when hipsters found solace in pop culture. Now, the new cool is to wear ‘90s-framed glasses, drink black coffee and perform spoken word about your loss of faith in humanity. If this describes you, congratulations, you’re a hipster in the most mainstream sense. However, you are not a true hipster until you genuinely enjoy these things as your own, rather than do them to buy into the new, hip, urban trend of being counter-society and above-it-all.

And, if you could care less about being a hipster, the takeaway from this is that, if you must judge the girl in the cafe with the brown striped fedora, judge her not as a hipster but as an individual. Thanks, she appreciates it.

__________

Felicia Zhang is the Business Director for The Fordham Ram.