Weekend Guide: It's hard to be hip...

over 30

Trying to be anything usually ends up being an effort in futility. The act of trying usually means you care just a bit too much — and I hate to say it, but that fully erases any sort of cool points off the board. Sorry. Zero. Take the L.

If you are over thirty like me (35), you are probably wrestling with the concept of cool. Do I still have it? Am I still hot? Are my shoes cool?

The answers to all of these questions, and plenty more just like it are undoubtedly.. no.

But that’s alright.

New Jersey native, Judith Viorst, wrote a tidy little book of poems about this struggle. Not much has changed in the fifty five years since its original publication.

We all still just want to be hip.

It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty And Other Tragedies of Married Life — damn!

I picked this baby up on the title alone and read it in one sitting. Quick, funny, deeply troubling — just like looking in the fucking mirror.

Engaged? Married? Depressed? Then read these wickedly funny poems by Judith Viorst, who was looking forward to orgiastic Village pot parties and fleeting moments of passion, but wound up, instead, in the suburbs with a washer-drier, a car pool, and Gerber's strained bananas in her hair.