i am the seagull... no, that's not it. i'm an actress!

this is not a long post, but the quote is gargantuan, because the person who wrote the original is nearly as loquacious as i am.

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once again Jacob, i love you, and your strangely philosophical recaps of a fucking tv show.

"Everything that rises must converge, and all that. Tending to one's own garden; being at peace. No, it sounds like settling when you say it that way. Living is not about complacency. But there comes a point when you realize some very important shit. I don't know all the things, I probably know very few of the things, but the things I know, which number exactly four, are as follows:

1) Nobody is watching you on secret cameras, so stop worrying about it. You'd be surprised how much pointless shame you can shed every day just by looking at the fucked-up thing you did and thinking about how fucked up it was for a few minutes. Then, drink a glass of water and get the fuck over yourself.

2) Your reputation is everything, but it's also totally recoverable. People are more worried about their shit than they will ever be about yours, and are looking for any opportunity to cut you a decent break, just so they don't have to think about you anymore. Your reputation is made up entirely of acts and behaviors, as perceived by other people (only the ones whose opinions are relevant). Do a thing enough times, and that's the person you are. Everything that happens to you from the direction of other people is entirely a reaction to this person. If you don't like those reactions, do a new thing instead, and after just a few times you will magically become a new person. Monitor the new responses.

3) Generally, we only look closely at the situation when it has become untenable. That's rough, because when the situation is untenable is precisely the point at which your best bet is to accept it as it is, and think about ways to change it. Instead, when things are bad is when we're most likely to wig out and act like idiots. You can't change what is until you're willing to look at what is, the ingredients and causes, and the ingredients it contains for the next thing. It changes every second, so you might as well be in charge of that and utilize your vast opportunities to choose the next what is.

4) Every minute that goes by, one of your futures dies. That's scary and it's sad, but it also means clarity. That sense of purpose S was talking about last week. Getting older means splitting less of your hope and energy into those million possible futures, and keeping more of it for yourself -- right now -- to keep moving forward toward what you really do want. And that's what Lily means. It's not about giving in, it's about giving up the maybes, one by one, until you become whole.*

*(This part will never actually happen, but you have to keep pretending it's going to, for your entire life. That's what Blair's Voltaire quote means: Hoe your own garden, for the rest of your life, because it is art, and it is very simple, and it is very hard to pull off correctly.)"

[TWoP recap of a Gossip Girl (yes you read that right) episode]

the thing about never being whole is what really gets me, because i interpret it like this:
being whole is about the essence of a person. the every reaction to any scenario. we are those little artsy coffee/tea mugs from Portugal; from the moment we are thrown into a specified shape, that is how we define ourselves. putting a handle on it, sticking it in the kiln and painting it, swirling little white spiral designs on the side, firing it up again, drinking out of it, etc - that's all a reaction to a mug. a cup. which really is still just clay, even if we never think of it as such.

i could go into Aristotle vs Plato, and the object vs the idea, but metaphysics is less important to my point than sociology. we label people. we set them aflame with the belief that they are how we perceive them, when really the perception only comes in after someone has moved, has acted, has shed light on a behavior and given our eyes something to work with in the first place.

i guess my point is this: to Live, instead of merely Existing, one must take charge of one's own movement. one cannot control how one comes out of the kiln anymore than one can control how light hits another's retinas, but one can manipulate the way shapes appear. failing that, one can affect the interpretation of an object, by confronting a person with differing images. one day you're a scrawny chessgeek with 42 posters of Jean-Luc Picard on your ceiling, and the next, there are three pairs of panties hanging from your bedpost and a Nobel Peace Prize on your wall. are you any more or less you than the day before?

sane, well-adjusted people do not concern themselves with the innermost thoughts and feelings of everyone around them. they are refractions of their parents and their friends, and will only ever focus on you when you give them a reason to. so show them someone you like.

when they intend to unname

i am enraptured by the near-universal abhorrence of hipsters.

The problem with hipsters seems to me{sic} the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be....One must start with the premise that the hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity, by a sense of lateness to the scene, or by the fact that his arrival fashions the scene—transforms people who are doing their thing into a self-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and exploit. The hipster is that person who shows up and seems to ruin things—then you can begin to ask why this person exists, whether he is inevitable, whether he can be stopped, and what it will take.

["The Death of the Hipster"; Rob Horning]

simply put, hipsters are the grandchildren conceived by postmodernist bitchfest orgies.

Hipsterdom is the first "counterculture" to be born under the advertising industry's microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it.

["Hipster: The Dead End Of Western Civilization"; Douglas Haddow]

as with all grandchildren who've been immersed in a culture vastly opposed to the oft-touted world from their ancestors hail, the hipster movement possibly began as a way for those attracted to the lifestyle to immerse themselves in the glories of the past they've only known vicariously. somewhere down the line though, the presumably honest attempt to embrace the riches of experiences past turned into a race to collect the most pop culture references. hence the constant condescending sneer of hipsters: they can rattle off the names of more 1970s musicians than any classic rock aficionado, even if they know nothing about band members, lyrics, or guitar tabs, and that dearth of pointless, contextually nullified information is what gives them power. or something.

He’s the one / Who likes all our pretty songs / And he likes to sing along / And he likes to shoot his gun / But he knows not what it means

["In Bloom"; Nirvana]

it certainly gives them something to say anytime someone asks a member of the tribe a question. if the answer neither makes sense nor has any tangential relation to the topic at hand, the technicalities don't phase a hipster; true Art is not dreamt of in philosophy, but an awkwardly-cropped rendering of Sofia Coppola dressed as a pack of Parliaments in converses, printed out from the internet and pinned or pasted onto a dingy pair of cutoff jeans stolen from a hobo in NYC.

That there exists somewhere in the past an item, ostensibly useless to humanity now, that could become a necessary accessory, is only a matter of creativity and originality...looking even farther into the past to find something that could be a mark of hipness in the present.

["Hipsters desperately seek new anachronism to claim as own"; The Enduring Vision (satire site)]

but let it never be said that hipsters aren't aware of their own tragedy.

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society....We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

["Hipster: The Dead End Of Western Civilization"; Douglas Haddow]

whatever, hipsters; i maintain that there is always something unique and interesting waiting to be discovered and appreciated. there may only be five original stories ever, but the eyes that observe and are moved by them have yet to find a doppelganger. i've sifted through your last, lost generation and remain bored; i demand my beatniks back.

otherwise, i'll see you at the bottom.