Dads who like booze donuts and sausage cocktails

Dear Hipster:

I’ve been having a kind of hipster crisis lately. I fear I am gradually becoming less and less cool. It seems like just yesterday I was tending bar, sleeping in, getting drunk at brunch, seriously worrying about my gluten intake, bitching about the high cost of Coachella passes, and paying my favorite tattoo artist way more than my dentist. Next thing you know, wham, I’m working an office job and I own a Lands' End blouse that I’ve called “really comfortable” with a straight face. I think I’m turning into a total square. See! Only a square would say “square.” Ugh. I know I used to be cool, because I never worried about it, and cool people don’t worry about their coolness. I’ve had plenty of crises in my life, but this is the first to challenge my sense of cool. Am I no longer cool? Do I even care?

— Linsey

You do you, home girl. Don’t worry about the deets. Now, watch me answer this without the obligatory Huey Lewis reference.

Sure, maybe you’ve embraced the nerdier things in life a little bit, but you can still spin vinyl at home and order something prominently featuring house-made toadstool bitters at the next office happy hour. Truthfully, yesterday’s hipster has evolved into, well, whatever it is you are. If you want to be the Lands’ End hipster, I certainly won’t stop you. Slip on your favorite pair of Weejuns, fire up the Camry, and dive headlong into your post-hipster hipster career with all the sass and irony you can muster. I guarantee you will discover ample chances to buck the mainstream.

Dear Hipster:

So, obviously you take a hipster mom out to a craft beer themed brunch for Hipster Mother’s Day. Maybe you get her a potted bamboo plant instead of cut flowers, because it’s more sustainable. Easy, right? But, what about a hipster dad? What do you do with him for Hipster Father’s Day? For some reason, the whole thing seems really inscrutable to me, like, a trick question or something.

— Henry

Ah, Hipster Father’s Day, the only holiday harder to handle than regular Father’s Day... or is it?

Unlike mainstream dads, hipster dads are much susceptible to offers of stereotypical Mother’s Day activities. Imagine the following dialogue:

CHILD: So, Dad, do you want to go out for brunch on Father’s Day?

REGULAR DAD: Sure. Whatever.

CHILD: Great! I heard about this new place where they put whole Andouille sausages in the Bloody Marys, and you can get IPA flavored donuts that get you drunk.

REGULAR DAD: Do I get a senior discount?

Contrast with:

CHILD: So, Dad, do you want to go out for brunch on Father’s Day?

HIPSTER DAD: Only if it’s to that new place where you can get drunk on donuts and drink sausage cocktails!

CHILD: You know it, Dad.

HIPSTER DAD: Hi five!

So, basically, Hipster Dads are moms with beards.

However, I would qualify this entire premise with a touch of reality. Like any dad, perhaps more than most, your average hipster dad doesn’t want gifts or brunches or anything material, at least not deep down. In his heart, the hipster dad just wants recognition above and beyond the token acknowledgement of Father’s Day, which most dads consider the second-rate Hallmark holiday consolation prize version of Mother’s Day (itself a second-rate Hallmark holiday). Hipster dads just want love.