I think that all of my uncertainties in life—which are not few—stem from one thing. And that one thing is that I cannot decide whether I want to be a pot-smoking hippie dirtbag who wears an unwashed Bob Marley t-shirt to her job at a local non-profit, or a well-groomed trophy wife with four Jack Russell terriers who serves on the board of the children’s hospital.
It’s the fundamental predicament of every middle-class white college kid this side of 1962: you can only fake being Jack Kerouac for so long. The modern hipster/progressive/whatever-you-call-yourself is nothing but a latterday beatnik, we all throw the same standard series disaffected, noncomformist, progessive-intellectual poses. Bemoaning the materialism of our society, decrying the evils of corporate greed, ranting about social injustice…all the while cashing our parents’ checks to pay tuition at our elite colleges, study abroad in Africa, buy our weed…
The problem is that this sort of thing has a short shelf life. It’s kind of cute on a twenty-year-old, but not much longer than that. Eventually you have to pick a team: either you make the commitment to your rise-above-society mentality, or you admit that you’re going to send in that law school application after all.
I’d like to think that I’m the “take a moral stand” type, not the “grow a handlebar mustache and vote Republican like everyone else” type. But even while I’m filling out the Peace Corps application, I’m always half-thinking… “what about the Jack Russells? And my future four-bedroom home in the suburbs? And eating organic fruit and vacationing in the Florida Keys? And driving a late-model hybrid Volvo with fourteen airbags?”
