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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

My so-called life in hip-disturbia

At first I had no idea what was going on. All those emails from old boyfriends and ex-colleagues, giving the strange impression that - after years of radio silence - they would like to be in contact with me again.
There was even a message from Amber, congratulating me for finally going gluten-free and vegan; years ago we had this ridiculous-in-retrospect falling out over butter. I had no idea I felt so passionately about butter, in a positive way; she felt just as passionately in the other direction, and suggested that my pro-butter stance verged on the lurid/kinky. Our friendship was sundered. Until now.
Joe D., who cast aspersions on my lineage, my intelligence, my sexual proclivities and even my taste in pets, when we broke up after the unfortunate incident with the capybara, emailed me to say that in the intervening decades he has embraced the varieties of human experience, that all is forgiven, and do I know any real estate agents? (Everyone in hipsturbia knows real estate agents. There are more real estate agencies than yoga studios. Though there are more hair salons than either.)
Strangest of all, by a factor of a gazillion and three, was hearing from Sister Flight into Egypt. Back when I was reading Nancy Drew mysteries on my lap during religion class in parochial school, I thought Sister Flight was about a hundred years old. I was very wrong. She is still very much alive, she has left the order, come out of the closet, and works on a biodynamic herb farm in upstate New York. She and her partner had apparently wanted to move back to the city and had set their sights on Brooklyn, until they read about our own hipsturbia up the river. I have no idea how she found me, but she did, and she said she had always know I was reading Nancy Drew mysteries while she expounded on the difference between mortal and venial sins; though now she understood my creative noncompliance as an early harbinger of the hip adult I must surely be, living as I do in hipsturbia. Oh, and she is no longer known as Sister Flight into Egypt. She is once again the Susie Shaughnessy of her youth.
I was beginning to see a pattern. And then CSB clued me in: it wasn’t me, it was Hastings. Apparently the paper of record singled out our village, though only in a “Wittgensteinian sort of way”, for the dubious distinction of “hipsturbia”.
I have no idea what it means to be a village in a Wittgensteinian sort of way, or even a Augustinian sort of way, or even less a Nietzschean sort of way. No more will I abide by Wittgenstein’s famous dictum from the end of Tractatus, in which he says: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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