Somewhere in America right now a Religious Studies graduate in white shutter shades is sucking the Pabst Blue Ribbon from his wispy mustache while listening to a pig-tailed girl offer her position on Metamorphosis. They are hipsters. I know this because I met them. They hang out in front of a Coffee Bean. They are Aubrey and Aubrey and they live for the moments when strangers suggest that name ought to be gender exclusive. They work part-time gathering signatures for obscure causes and spend the rest of their time arguing about Sartre and Derrida and who borrowed whose pants. They are preparing for a revolution, slowly.

For some, posing comes naturally.

When I first met the Aubreys, they carried clipboards and told me that if I wasn’t furious then I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t furious at the time, I was embarrassed. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be furious about, which started to feel like furiousness and that seemed like a pretty good start. "The American consumer is the raping and murdering foreign cultures," mustached Aubrey told me while jabbing a finger in my chest. He was pale and even behind his glasses I could see that he was ugly. He had the kind of face you could believe was cooked up inside a human body, not like the usual miracles you see running around. "Who do you think made those sandals you’re wearing?" he spat. "Those cutoff jeans? That Looney Tunes sweatshirt?" It was a laundry day. "I’ll tell you who, some poor kid in the third world getting paid pennies so that you could save a couple of bucks."

Horrible? Or adorable?

The other Aubrey flicked the butt of a cigarette somewhere and told me I was a docile lamb in the slaughterhouse of capitalism. She pushed the clipboard into my arms and held out a pen. "Sign it. It’s a petition to end sweatshop labor in Monaco." "There are sweatshops in Monaco?" I asked. She ripped the clipboard from my hands, stared at it for a moment and shoved it back. "Morocco," she said. "There is blood on your hands if you don’t." They were right, they had to be, they were so angry. I wanted to be angry too, I wanted to feel the fire of insurgency in my stomach. I signed the sheet, a heart above the "i" as always. I have forever declared myself an advocate of popular dissent, but now it was true. Also, I felt pretty good about my odds of sleeping with the female Aubrey. "What else can I do? Is this the type of problem I can throw money at?" "C’mon guy," mustached Aubrey said, "you don’t care about this stuff like we do." "But I want to. How can I help? Should I assemble the people? Can we riot or something?" "Nah, we get off in like 10 minutes, and I’m a backup DJ for show tonight, so…" He took off his beanie and wiped his forehead. I saw his hair for the first time, he had it on sideways.

Aubrey was good at discretely taking his own photo.

"Is that haircut intentional?" I asked. Aubrey rolled his eyes. "It’s ironic." "Do you mean sideways?" "I hope that question is ironic." "It is," I lied. He was so cool. Breasted Aubrey suggested I come to the show. "It’s a musical experimentation with socialist undertones. I mean, if that’s a cause you feel passionately about." I assured her it was. I used phrases like "classless order" and "collectivism" but in no particular order and without the context of an actual sentence. It was enough. She agreed to drive me but we would have to stop by mustached Aubrey’s parent’s house to pick up his vinyl. Ten minutes later we crawled into a Lincoln Navigator and were off. In the car I had an opportunity to look her over. She wore her hair in tiny, unnecessary pigtails and I could just make out the ink behind her ear. "What does your tattoo say?" She touched it and smiled, "It means ‘Peace.’ Or like, ‘Vitality,’ I can’t remember. It’s Tibetan I think."