People are always asking me, “How can I be more like you?” And I reply, with austere elegance, “You mean (dramatic pause) tragically hip?” And they say, “I was talking to the guy behind you.” And I say, “Oh, well, could you get off my foot then?” Nonetheless, people should want to know how to be tragically hip, or at least serio-comically hip. And I, being the benevolent time-wastrel that I am, will provide some pointers. Pointers meaning tips. Not Pointers meaning dogs. Pointers that will help you be hip. Not Pointers who will invariably shed and scratch at the door at 4:36 AM and then when you don’t let them out, relieve themselves on your newly installed vinyl tile floor from Home Depot that you spent your Saturday afternoon cutting into precise heptagonal figures (because six sides just doesn’t cut it anymore).
Anyhow.
Being hip is easier than you might think. One thing to think about when increasing your hiptitude is turtlenecks. Necks are out, people. No one cares how your head stays atop your body anymore. It’s extra information that we don’t have time for. Like email. Who has time to get to their computer anymore. I mean, are we snails? Is this 1996 when all we had to do was sit around and contemplate where our email was and what the hell that Olympic mascot thing was anyway? If you want to be hip, you need to check email only through palm-pilots or cell phones, and only while in mid conversation with some insignificant peon (And who isn’t an insignificant peon these days?). And don’t ever respond to email. Who has time for that? Kindergarten teachers and ER nurses maybe, since they have nothing to do.
All this pales in comparison, however, to the true measure of hip. The sincerely hip individual eats Chinese food. They eat it with guests, in romantic pairs, for Thanksgiving; the time and setting is insignificant. But the hip individual never ever ever takes Chinese food out of the carton and only eats it with chopsticks. Observe movies, television, anything that really holds a mirror up to our society, and you’ll see I’m right. New Yorkers (hands down the hippest bunch of cats since… well, just since) always eat Chinese food, and they always, always eat it out of the cartons with wooden sticks. Maybe because they’re just too hip to break out the China and flatware. Or maybe they’re just racist and don’t think food from the rich Eastern bastion of thought, invention, and noodles ‘worthy” of their fine dinnerware (which is ironically from the same region as the food they’ve deemed unworthy). Well, to those jerks I say, “Get some paper plates, jerks! Come down with the rest of us.” But if you’re eating out of the carton because you’re hip, well, then, I say, “Yeah, man…. yeah.”
And that is how to be hip, my friends. Tragically hip.