#18) Pregnancy

There is nothing more humiliating to a hipster than when her thrift-store bought maternity dress stops being ironic.

Tonight, a hipster will be impregnated. Maybe she’ll buckle to the baristo at the local coffee shop, seduced by his beard and self-aware Exxon-Mobil trucker hat. Perhaps it will be that V-necked charmer at the dive bar who claims to be Ariel Pink’s tour manager. Or maybe it will just be that guy whose filthy apartment she’s been sleeping at for the last month so she doesn’t have to pay rent.

Hipsters are very torn about pregnancy. On the one hand, they don’t have any problem with abortion seeing as they got their BA in post-structuralist conceptual astrology and have endured hundreds of hours of NPR, Ira Glass’ infanticidal socialist drone lingering in their subconscious. On the other hand, being pregnant is kind of cool. It gives them some sort of purpose in an otherwise directionless post-graduate existence. In fact, some hipster girls dream of having a traditional nuclear family. They fantasize about their husband handsomely dressed in wool flannel and Ray-Bans returning home from his long shift at the record store and coddling their infant son decked out in a vintage neon Morrissey romper.

That said, most of the time they just get an abortion.

[Weekend update: Secret society hipsters?]

It was my best friend’s going away party. She was leaving for France the following morning and her roommate threw her a bash so that hopefully she would still be drunk when she got on the plane. Over the course of the night, I sought the biggest hipsters I could spot and struck up conversations, discretely studying my subjects in the wild. I anticipated encountering some awkward pauses and music elitism galore, but I never expected I would end up shooing coke-head hipster secret society members out of my friend’s bathroom.

There were four of them; three were clad in identical skin-tight black jeans and an assortment of black and white shirts and black leather jackets, and the other one (I can only assume he was the leader) was sporting a plaid button-down. When I commented on one of the jackets, the SS hipster disclosed that he got it at Beacon’s Closet for $20! During introductions, SS Hipster #1 did not hesitate to inform me of his self-importance.

“Yeah, I’m in a secret society,” he said nonchalantly, tossing his bangs.

“That’s cool,” I said. “What’s the point of it?”

“Yeah…” he started, a faraway look in his eyes, “I can’t really talk about it. You know. It’s a secret society.”

“Oh yeah, whatever. It’s fine,” I replied. “I’ll probably be tapped soon anyway.”

Later on that night they invited me to join! “Ah, sorry, I’m already in two others.”

When the party started to wind down, my friend’s roommate left for the bar with his posse, leaving just a few us to proceed with drunken goodbyes. But then all of a sudden, the hipster secret society members were back and snorting coke in my friend’s room!

I don’t know what it is about secret society hipsters that makes them think it’s OK to be the last people at a party where they don’t know anyone where even the host is trying to leave, while they wait for their friend to “use the bathroom” for 15 minutes (I fear for her nasal cavity!) but like, that’s gotta be a party foul on some level. It’s cool though because I had the opportunity to take this photo and blow their cover! In the absence of my photographer, I had to revert to my tried and true hipster-photography method of inserting a plant into the pic.

Tap this!

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Photo by Lola Wakefield for Stuff Hipsters Don’t Like ©2008

Expert Photoshopping by Laine Stranahan for Stuff Hipsters Don’t Like ©2008

# 11) Misha Calvert… and pageants in general

This bodega-robbing pageant creator actually asked me interview her. Me thinks that's pretty narcissistic, but whatever...

I e-met this hipSTAR after our pet projects were featured 2 posts away from each other on FREEwilliamsburg.com, which I’m sure you all check daily, if not by having the page perpetually open and refreshing the screen every few minutes or so. After robbing a bodega and creating the Mr and Miss Williamsburg Pageant as retribution, Misha became an infamous icon in the hipster realm, attracting a stream of comments with such sentiments as “I hope your eggs fall out Misha,” “i hope you fall onto the L train tracks” and “lousy fucking bitch-cunt,” among others. But shrugging these comments off with skilled nonchalance, her pageant will prevail – and be attended by Gawker.

Mischa reached out to me through email and suggested that I participate in her pageant. I wrote her back, commended her for robbing the bodega (which started this whole escapade), and graciously agreed to participate. After that, we emailed each other back and forth so much that we automatically popped up on each others’ g-talk lists, and so the conversations began.

One day, Misha said, “I’d love to do an interview.” My narcissistic inclinations shining through, I asked when she wanted to interview me. Her narcissistic inclinations trumping mine tenfold, she explained that she was asking me to interview her.

In the midst of awkward confusion, Misha suggested that we “shake up the medium” and interview each other, and so this interview was born. Hopefully, it will satiate everyone’s narcissistic inclinations:

Lola: So Misha, judging from some of the comments on websites that featured your pageant, it appears that hipsters don’t like you. Do you generally find this to be true?

Misha: First of all, thank you for recognizing that I am not a hipster. Although by many accounts, that very denial would make me one.

Lola: This is correct

#8) Corporate attire

***RECENTLY UPDATED***

The other day, I did something awful for which I will surely be shunned throughout Williamsburg:

I got hired.

Oh, it gets worse. I didn’t just get hired at any old dive bar or bodega – I was hired by a corporation in the financial district where I would work 9-5 shifts. At such an institution, the term “disposable income” might cease to be an intangible concept like “the real world” and “success.” (Note: especially for hipsters, these things are eternally intangible.)

I don’t know what made me apply with that temp agency in the first place. Hipsters characteristically abhor employment and having self-generated income, preferring instead to spend their days complaining about their lack of adhesion to the larger world outside their college bubbles. To be a genuine hipster, I should have embraced my inner insecurity and continued spending business hours searching craigslist job postings at the local internet cafe and sleeping in my windowless room. By joining Corporate America, my hipster dilemma would cease to be a dilemma.

But as I would learn going to my job interview, the worst part about being employed by a corporation is that you automatically become excommunicated from hipster social circles. This happens for many reasons, the most prominent of which is that you are forced to do something that is intolerable in a hipster’s mind: You must wear “corporate attire.”

It was on this day I realized that while hipsters will enthusiastically faux-grudgingly wear any combination of seemingly ridiculous or unfunctional clothing and walk down Bedford Avenue with pride (or at least with a “I know I’m hot but if you look at me again I will fucking kill you” ambiance), the one thing a hipster will not wear is a suit. They are also hesitant about anything that falls under the “corporate attire” category.

For example, here is a website that attempts to market corporate attire to hipster females:

This website attempt to lure its target audience by advertising with two things hipsters dislike: working and participating in "new trends." Perhaps they thought the irony would fool them into buying their merch?

As you can see, this company is trying to market it’s clothing to both the hipster and the corporate whore, but I anticipate their plan will fail due to the prominance of the “how to” section on their site. Hipsters would never buy anything from someone who is telling them how to do something, especially if that something is dressing like a yupster.

Walking down Havemeyer at 8:00 am (AM!!! Note: This is a hipster’s deepest REM sleep time), the streets were empty save a few hipsters in suits. If you think that the disposition of a hipster is generally distraught, seeing the agony on the faces of the few hipsters whoring themselves out to Corporate America, onlookers would surely assume they were on their way to a concentration camp.

Beyond being physically uncomfortable in the loose-fitting slacks, non-v-necked button-up shirts and other items of customary corporate garb, hipsters feel the utmost sense of embarassment while walking the streets of Williamsburg in such blasphemous clothing. As researchers have learned through in-depth interviews with corporate hipsters, this feeling can only be compared to what hipsters felt when were forced to walk the halls of their middle schools wearing parentally-purchased items that weren’t at all what the “cool” kids were wearing. As this crippling stage of development is known as the root of all the common hipster’s problems (and is therefore considered the inspiration for their pilgrimige to Williamsburg), the irony that these feelings should be rekindled in their place of solace is too much for the hipster to bear. To compensate, the corporate hipster then spends approximately 85% of his gross income on cocaine and Jack Daniels.

At my interview I was instantly hired and asked to come in for a background test the next morning. I left feeling desolate at the thought I would have to endure the hipster walk of shame every week day. I couldn’t even fathom what the walk home from the JMZ would be like, what with the hipsters awake and in full force. I resigned myself to taking comfort in that I would soon be home and could change into an empire-waisted plaid dress and flip flops.

****UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!****

Good news: By a stroke of luck I slept through my background check! I was deeply humbled by that extreme close call and have since vowed to never work anywhere where “corporate attire” is required. Or anywhere that I have to wake up at 7:30 am every day. Or anywhere with the word “Corporation” in its title.

That same day, I was hired on Bedford Avenue! When I walked in on my first day, my manager (who wears tight jeans and has hella tattoos) was smoking a cigarette outside while the front desk was unattended. Hence, my first official training exercise was “how to smoke cigarettes and stand around.” I go into work at 4pm and the only requirement is that I “try to be nice to people.” I’m making a full $10 and hour less than I would be at the corporation, but I can do whatever the fuck I want (which consists of blogging and drinking coffee)!

Expect great posts to come.

[Weekend update: Hipster scamming at Barcade]

Friday night at Barcade (it’s a bar, and an arcade – and a hipster nerd hot spot), a hipster bought a single cigarette from me for $3. There was no haggling, I wasn’t being obstinate; $3 was the initial offer, which I skeptically accepted.

This proves that hipsters will pay up to 6 times the retail value of an object in order to look cool. In fact, they prefer to overpay – the more money an object is purchased for over its actual worth, the more sentimental value the object acquires in the hipster’s heart. This theorem can also be applied to vintage clothing, records and cocaine. However, if an object’s actual value is so low it is practically zero while the cost is astronomical, the object could not be considered anything other than scraps of trash, crossing into the category of “modern art.” This is more of a yuppie interest.