{"id":55225,"date":"2019-09-25T18:14:28","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T23:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brookegeery.com\/?p=55225"},"modified":"2019-09-25T18:14:28","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T23:14:28","slug":"snowboarding-without-irony-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/?p=55225","title":{"rendered":"SNOWBOARDING WITHOUT IRONY"},"content":{"rendered":"\t

Archives<\/h1>\t\t
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\"\"<\/a>Being \u201ccool\u201d in the 21st century is a tricky thing. As \u201ccore\u201d snowboarders, we grapple with it daily. Just read the comment sections on this site and you\u2019ll see, snowboarding is a competitive fashion show masked as a \u201csport\u201d and parading as a fun activity. But why? Why are we so concerned about the size of each other\u2019s pants or the straightness of a boardslide?<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0recent article in the New York Times<\/a>\u00a0Princeton French professor Christy Wampole hits the nail on the head of what is actually the much bigger plight of an entire generation. Millennials, born in the 80s and 90s. are are growing up and coming to terms with the fact that they are becoming real life adults. Their coping mechanism: 100% irony. After reading every word of this nearly 2000 word article (too long for the next generation of kids raised on Myspace wall posts and facebook) I had an epiphany. Snowboarding\u2019s growing pains are just like the crisis of ironic living, but rather than hating the \u201cHipsters,\u201d those in snowboarding put their misplaced disgust on the \u201cJoeys,\u201d blaming them for crowding the hill and \u201cruining our sport,\u201d a great irony in and of itself.<\/p>\n

Wampole explains:<\/p>\n

Throughout history, irony has served useful purposes, like providing a rhetorical outlet for unspoken societal tensions. But our contemporary ironic mode is somehow deeper; it has leaked from the realm of rhetoric into life itself. This ironic ethos can lead to a vacuity and vapidity of the individual and collective psyche\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In smaller words, Irony can be a plague, and it can drag you down with it. And there\u2019s nothing more ironic than being a \u201ccool\u201d snowboarder.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Think about the \u201cJoey\u201d or \u201cChad\u201d or \u201ckook.\u201d Go ride on a weekend and they are on every intermediate trail and mountain base lodge. They completely disregard fashion, new equipment, or what\u2019s cool. They rock GoPros on every mount imaginable, jeans and starter jackets, giant mittens with T-shirts, and are out there for one reason: to have a damn good time. They ride for a few hours, parade in at noon for lunch like lemmings, take another run or two then retire to the bar. There\u2019s a good chance they fall getting off the lift.<\/p>\n

But those poorly outfitted, low-skilled weekend warriors are boarding irony-free. They are doing it 100% because it is a fun way to spend a day. Meanwhile, the most ironic of all boarders, the cool kids, are too busy worry about their pants being over their highbacks, they don\u2019t wanna admit that they might just be kindred spirits. Or worse, someday that Joey might ride enough to become one of them.<\/p>\n

So ask yourself, when did this happen for you? If you consider yourself a \u201ccore\u201d snowboarder, think about what that means. You follow trends, you know what tricks are cool and which are super lame, and you probably have left a hate comment on the Internet. But you\u2019ve also fallen getting off the lift (more recently than you like to admit), gotten a little too excited about \u2018gramming your friends while they board, and dropped your glove mid-trail or off the lift. Are you really that much better than the \u201cJoey?\u201d Really?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Wampole explains it like this:<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously, hipsters (male or female) produce a distinct irritation in me, one that until recently I could not explain. They provoke me, I realized, because they are, despite the distance from which I observe them, an amplified version of me.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you replace the word hipster with Joey, it becomes much more clear. We\u2019re all just Joey\u2019s, out there, having a good time. Two wise men once said, \u201cIf it\u2019s not fun, why do it,\u201d so as snowboarding\u2019s ultimate ironic hipsters we say: At the end of the day, we were all Joey\u2019s once, and realistically we all still are, so get out there, board and remember, no matter how tight or loose our pants get we\u2019ll still never be as cool as skateboarding. Get over yourself and just have fun.<\/p>\n

Read the inspiration for this rant\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\/<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Archives Being \u201ccool\u201d in the 21st century is a tricky thing. As \u201ccore\u201d snowboarders, we grapple with it daily. Just read the comment sections on this site and you\u2019ll see, snowboarding is a competitive fashion show masked as a \u201csport\u201d and parading as a fun activity. But why? Why are we so concerned about the size of each other\u2019s pants or the straightness of a boardslide? In a\u00a0recent article in the New York Times\u00a0Princeton French professor Christy Wampole hits the nail on the head of what is actually the much bigger plight of an entire generation. Millennials, born in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[2194],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55229,"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55225\/revisions\/55229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brookegeery.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}