Just Make it to the Kitchen...

I had just settle in for reading the last 40 pages for my Org Behaviors exam when inspiration for a blog post came along. My roommate had been tolerating me watching Current TV for the past four hours, but after the sitting through the light programming of Rotten Tomatoes, infoMania, and Super News (he had gotten up when I decided to watch La Blogotheque, which I highly recommend if you like indie bands recording a sort of music video thing all in one take out on the streets), he decided that he didn't want to watch world news about pandemics and such.

"You know, Adult Swim is on."

"Yeah, I know. Is there really anything good on there anymore?" [Short answer - no. Long answer - yes... but it's few and far between.]

So I relented, and started changing channels before we both got distracted by QaF. I wasn't nearly distracted enough, so I got up and began reading some more, where I was until inspiration for this post came. And as it turns out, I gave up my intellectual inquiry into current events just for a brief moment before my roommate decided to go to bed, so I got up for nothing.

In any case, my point: I felt delightfully hipster by sitting down and watching that much Current TV. It's fairly unfounded in my opinion, but given the choice that laid before me tonight of watching Super News or Family Guy reruns, I think I deviated from the pop culture norm enough in this case. Annie joined me for watching Blogotheque, and she left saying that she felt pleasantly elite.

So where do we draw this line with this feeling good about being all indie and cultural and mindful of the world? And let's not sugarcoat it, this is in some way about feeling damn smug and elite too.

I know I get a warm, superior feeling whenever I use my reusable bags to go grocery shopping for ingredients for something healthy that I'm making from scratch. I feel better when I'm listening to a band that's not well known on the way back from the grocery store. I then feel even better still when pulling out a discarded soda bottle from the trash and putting it in our recycling bin.

So, do I take pride in being like that? Sure. But I also take pride in making fun of people who take the whole eco friendly or hipster thing too far. Someone who refuses to listen to anything played on a radio because The Man has already gotten to it? Hah! A person who will only eat things they've grown themselves to stick it to big agribusiness? More for me. Some random protester out there shaming our dependency on oils and plastics while wearing clothing only hand made from itchy things that weren't made from synthetic fibers in sweatshops? I'll probably just drive by.

There's got to be a happy medium that the world can silently agree on as being kind of annoyingly smug, but productively and fairly unobtrusively so. Because I like my music, my meager attempts at reducing the amount of waste I generate, and especially my ability to completely separate myself from the fast food/over processed food markets when I feel like making something delicious. But I don't want to be that kid who takes it a step too far and have everyone secretly blog about how annoying I am.

And yes, they would blog, because pretentious people often have pretentious friends that won't ever address anything relevant in person, they'll just blog about it. And I know that I complain plenty in real life, so at least I'm not that far gone yet.

I came into this with a clear point, and I seem to have lost it. Oh well, now I'm going to go get a cookie.