All in all, the hipster pseudo-swap meet was more fun than it actually was. . .

My hipster roommate dragged me yesterday to what I can only describe as a hipster pseudo-swap meet. It was pitched to me thusly: bring a well-formed object of your personal possession that has lost your interest (or you no longer need) and take something that someone else has left. The "pseudo-" descriptor indicates that traditional scheming and bartering were prohibited.

The full spirit of the thing precludes holding on to your item of interest until something else that you want comes along, and we participated accordingly. I brought a couple of Japanese phrasebooks and a small dictionary, my other roommates a keyboard and a couple of other books and we left.

"Underground liberals in Utah County?" So I was excited. After an hour the tables were covered in clothes, a few books and a nice vegan (of course) curry the organizer of the event had brought with cashews and what my roommate described as a kind of Indian bread.

All in all, anybody looking to come out of the event with something very nice would have been disappointed. I got a pretty neat green necktie and a small meal out of the event. But scientists have proven that it's more therapeutic to go into a transaction with limited choices then with all of the caveats and loopholes that modern society provides, and what could be more limiting than giving up irrevocably something that you own for something else to be determined upon arrival? I hope this thing expands by a reasonable amount, but not too much - making this into a bona fide event would attract the opportunists and ruin the spirit of the thing.