You might be a hipster…

You know, in a swarm of ironic social buzzwords, many people are still very much confused as to what a hipster is. Is it an insult or a compliment? Who is called a hipster? Who calls a hipster? What exactly is a hipster?

Well, if there is any doubt in your mind, take heed… I have compiled a set of identifying guidelines worthy of Jeff Foxworthy with the self-same truckerbeard, John Deere mesh-cap, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Dukes-of-Hazard-aesthetic appeal.

1. If you have been called a hipster and scoffed a big sneer while chanting the mantra “no way, I’m not a hipster,” you might be a hipster.
2. If you’ve worn a Che Guevara t-shirt while openly describing fashion trends to corporate “cool” scouts, you might be a hipster.
3. If you shop at thrift stores with a platinum credit card, you might be a hipster.
4. If you brag about reading Foucault, Kropotkin and Kerouac, but can only parrot a few intelligent-sounding, but hardly-significant quotes, you might be a hipster.
5. If you go to a coffee shop to have conversations with your laptop, you might be a hipster.
6. If you have one black friend for the sake of saying you have a black friend, you might be a hipster.
7. If you push off a discussion of good music because your bands are too obscure to ever talk about, you might be a hipster.
8. If you are over 18 and take kickball games at the park a little too seriously, you might be a hipster.
9. If you constantly complain of being “exploited”  in a “dead-end job” and still had enough to buy a new mac, iPod, iPhone, iRefridgerator, you might be a hipster.
10. If you’ve never heard the word “gentrification” used in conjunction with “racism,” you might be a hipster.
11. If you’ve never been caught eating in public, you might be a hipster.
12. If you drink fortified wine and lack a shopping cart, you might be a hipster.
13. If you think Polaroid snapshots of random architecture is edgy, you might be a hipster.*
14. If you drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and cannot crush a beer can on your head, you might be a hipster.
15. If you are an art school dropout, you might be a hipster.
16. If you cannot decide what is “deck,” spend five hours on the streetcorner debating what is “deck,” almost come to some sort of conclusion or consensus as to what is “deck,” but subsequently decide that it’s really just “lame” and move onto some other meaningless, irrelevant or unproductive conversation, you might be a hipster.
17. If you scoff a popularity, but have more contacts in your cell phone than in Donald Trump’s rollodex, you might be a hipster.
18. If you believe there are only two domains of social geography: city and suburb, you might be a hipster.
19. If you think Ludwig von Beetoven was punk rock, you might be a hipster.
20. If you take your participation in the adult kickball league a little too seriously, you might be a hipster.
21. If you are thoroughly convinced you are cool (especially) when everyone else in the room says you’re lame, you might be a hipster.
22. If you live in Brooklyn and pretend you live in West Virginia, you might be a hipster.

* This might be a shocker, but Polaroid photography had already lost its edge in the art world by 1998, when a Polaroid fine arts photographer was featured in Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, a gay-themed film. And gay-themed films with some very notable exceptions are notorious for camp-stenched kitsch and deadbeat pastiche, or edginess, if you are a hipster.

So there you have it. Cheers, hipsters.