Can someone become a hipster by accident? I don't smoke anything, drink Pabst or any kind of coffee, wear large glasses, sun or otherwise, or sport funky angular hair in colors never found on mammalian heads in nature. I do not live in Brooklyn, and I don't own a fixed-gear bike, or any bike for that matter. All the computers in my house run Windows. I can't play guitar, and I find Zooey Deschanel mildly irritating.

However:

1. Whenever people ask me what I'm listening to on my old mp3 player and I tell them, nine times out of ten I have to follow it up with, "You probably don't know them. It's Russian classic rock/Russian shanson/French chanson/French pop/Finnish folk/Finnish reggae/Czech gypsy rap/Faroese Viking metal/German punk/German dancehall reggae/a renegade philologist singing old Soviet propaganda songs in Yiddish to a klezmer band."

2. I eat gluten-free. (For medical reasons.)

3. I am very good at one very specific craft (bead jewelry).

4. I like hats. Since cutting off my hair, I even look passably okay in them.

5. By now, most of my clothes and shoes are old enough to be if not vintage then at least retro. They fall broadly into two categories: clothes/shoes I still have from high school/college and stuff from thrift stores. Not sure if that is hipster or just sad.

6. I wear fingerless gloves. Arthritis gloves, for the most part - I have bad circulation in extremities.

7. I have one of those bullshit 'creative' jobs that I could never actually live on if I had to.

8. Most of the people I know and hang out with are artists.

9. I constantly write novels I never show anyone.

10. The only thing I watch on TV are cartoons and 30 Rock.

Sigh.