From Saturday's Toronto Star, a story about the incredible effort it takes to stay just that much cooler than everybody else.

An excerpt:

... You have all the latest indie-rock CDs, the right art books, the latest ironic fashions, you make sure you are seen with the right people in the right clubs at the right times. But of course, it's impossible to keep on top of every trend. At some point you will feel the need to unplug — if only for a while — especially once the gloriously busy days of summer are upon us.

The problem is, the minute you stop paying attention to what's cool, you aren't.

Still wondering what defines the elusive hipster? The Hipster Handbook calls hipsters people who possess "tastes, social attitudes and opinions, deemed cool, by the cool." And according to the author, he was coming down with a case of HB when he started his satirical guide to everything cool.

"One of the main inspirations for it was that I was getting sick of it all. So (the book) was sort of a satire on people who do spend way too much time finding out what the new hip band is, the hot haircut, that sort of thing," says Robert Lanham, who wrote the Handbook and its sequel, Food Court Druids, Cherohonkies, and Other Creatures Unique to the Republic. Both sarcastically classify types of hipsters, losers and wannabes.

Lanham thinks hipsters are in a sort of crisis now, which is partly their own fault — and partly the media's.

"I think we really are at a point now where hipsters have gotten a little bit older, a little bit smarter and they've entered the mainstream and corporate America," he says.

"So they (the media) know about the trends as they're going on. ... It used to be a trend would hit the underground, it would take six months for the mainstream to figure out what was going on, and then the trend would become passé. I think the shelf life on trends is a lot shorter."

Which makes the likelihood of burnout all the more real.