I rarely pass up an opportunity to make fun of hipsters. The problem is, I think I might actually be one.

Last Saturday, I fulfilled a childhood dream by seeing Tom Petty live in concert. He played at the Frank Erwin Center, the only large venue available in the city of Austin (unless you count the football stadium, which you shouldn’t.) Tom Petty has had a long, successful career, amassing a wide array of classic, beloved songs. His appeal is broad and his music is oddly timeless. As a result, he serves as an effective hipster repellant.

Part of my issue with hipsters en masse is that they defy description–in fact, defying categorization is a defining characteristic of the hipster. A hipster is largely defined by what he or she isn’t. Rather than contribute new ideas, fashions, or innovations, they tend to recycle old ones (often ones better left discarded.) Outdated fashions become the latest “ironic” trend, which drives me mad because of its abuse of the very concept of “irony.”

Here’s what I realized in my few hours at the Frank Erwin Center on Saturday, though: I spend my days ensconced in hipsterdom. When I’m not working at home, I’m at one of several hipster-filled coffee establishments. In my extracurricular life, I’m at one of several east Austin or downtown theaters either performing or watching improv. When I do go to see music, I usually go to places like the Parish or Stubb’s, which may have a strong frat boy contingent, but also a fair portion of Austin’s hipsters. I live in a hipster bubble. On Saturday night, I stepped out of that bubble.

What I realized, stepping out of the hipster bubble, is that there really is something worse than a person wearing gaudy, tacky clothing as an ironic statement: someone wearing the same clothing because they think it looks good. I found myself longing for the company of a guy in oversized white plastic glasses and a girl with 3″ ear gauges and a tattoo of a Smurf who will tell me how they were into dubstep when it was still only a thing in a two city-block area in lower Manhattan. (I actually don’t know anything about dubstep, lower Manhattan, or music snobbery that is not directly related to ska, so please bear with me as I strain this analogy.)

The only other time I recall quite such a jarring awakening into the ordinary world occurred a few years ago, when a friend and I were heading to a bar that I thought was in the area just west of downtown Austin. He was driving, and for reasons neither he nor I understood, he decided to go to the new location of the same bar in Round Rock. For those not familiar with the Austin area, Round Rock is the boring suburban lump on the city’s forehead. At the time, Round Rock did not have a smoking ban, so they first thing I noticed was a far greater quantity of smoke and chest coughing in the bar. I then saw a group of women come into the bar, looking like they were either reenacting someone’s bachelorette party or applying to join the junior Red Hat Society. Several of them were wearing bright pink feather boas, which they frequently tossed around in a dramatic, Rita Hayworth-esque fashion. This did not strike me as odd at all until I realized that they were being completely serious. This was not some nod to irony. This was a situation where they were getting ready to go out, and they probably each stood in front of the mirror, wound the boa around their necks, as said “Darlin’, you look gooooooooooooood.” (That’s how it sounds in my head, anyway.) No disrespect to these ladies, but where I come from, pink feather boas are reserved for ironic, artistic, or drag queen purposes.

Now, at the Tom Petty concert, one thing I noticed was the mustaches. The mustache is something of a standard now for the male hipster visage, coming in all shapes, sizes, and levels of shagginess. For an ordinary schmoe, the mustache is a throwback add-on. The only real difference between a hipster with a big bushy mustache and an ordinary schmoe with the same mustache is size. The stereotypical hipster is skinny. The stereotypical ordinary schmoe is not. Very, very not. In fact, the hipster with the big bushy mustache probably weighs about the same as whatever the ordinary schmoe with the big, bushy mustache ate for lunch today.

My point in all of this is yet another mea culpa. I do not wear skintight blue jeans. I buy all of my shoes new. I have been to Buffalo Exchange one time, and they made fun of me there. Despite that, almost all of my t-shirts have quirky or ironic phrases or pictures. I eschew most popular music. I look askance at people who have bad taste and don’t know it. I cannot conceive living more than eight to ten miles from my city’s center. I am a low-grade hipster.

That said, Tom Petty fucking rocked it Saturday night.