Transparency

This, as the kids used to say. Writers writing about writing not paying. Shall I join in? Places I've written for as a freelancer tend to pay between $50 and $100 an article. This can be parlayed into other things, and something is absolutely better than nothing (which is what my first regular post-college writing gig paid, back when I was too naive to know one was meant to ask for payment), and it's probably a different story for people who establish themselves on staff various places and then switch to freelance (I'm thinking of someone like Jessica Grose)... but it does say something about the viability of full-time freelancing as a career.

What the article unfortunately doesn't mention is how what "writing" consists of has changed. Yes, if you wanted to be a poet or novelist, this was always going to be a struggle if you didn't come from money or hit it big with something you wrote while still in high school. But now, anything however tangentially related to publishing or journalism likely won't pay. I do repeat myself on this, but it's important: The day job has become, for many, an unpaid, no-insurance-providing "dream job." Work that isn't particularly artistic (sorry but that first episode of "Girls"...) is somehow The Arts.

I could try to analyze this further - is this about places marketing themselves cleverly in order to get clerical work done for free? - but I want to make the most of this enormous stamp-card mocha and get some other writing done.

Idiosyncratic disadvantage

Commenter (and college friend) Jena brought up a good point in the comments to the post below:

I see a second issue with the scholarship, too, but I'm having trouble articulating it beyond a few examples. I have friends who didn't apply for a scholarship for cancer survivors "because I was never an inpatient" and others who didn't apply for a scholarship for children of divorce "because my parents still like each other." There's already a lot of downplaying of health and family problems as "not as bad as others" - sort of an anti-one-upmanship? - which seems counter to the point of such scholarship. Sure, the writer doesn't have AS BAD a disadvantage as others ... but does that matter?

With scholarships, there are merit-based ones, need-based ones, and then special-factor ones, which may or may not be about obstacles overcome. But given that this discussion was in reference to the ones that are - inspired by the qualms of a grad-school applicant with hearing loss - let's focus on that angle. The following thoughts come out of some off-blog discussions of this topic, but it seemed worth bringing back to WWPD as well. Some more half-formed thoughts are below:

In principle, it seems like a good thing that scholarships acknowledge an ever-broader spectrum of disadvantages. One of the big problems with "privilege" as a framework, as it's generally used, is that we can kind of forget that all things equal, the white/male/rich have it easy, but that on an individual basis, obstacles come from a great many sources, and don't all fit into the (admittedly ever-expanding) list of generally-agreed-upon categories.

In practice, category-expansion (and we're using scholarships as the example) poses several problems. The first is that there will always be obstacles that fall through the cracks, that fail to reach the public's awareness, or that are just too idiosyncratic to get categories of their own. This, though, isn't necessarily such a problem, for the obvious 'why not do some good even if there's no fixing everything' reasons. That Person A comes from a messed-up family doesn't change the fact that racism continues to exist, or that those without rich parents have a tougher time paying for college. (Caryatis, does this at all address your concern?)

The second and more pressing is that the further you get from a category like race or class, the more likely you are to venture into the kind of territory individuals may not want to disclose about. Indeed, disclosure would be a strange phrasing if we're talking about putting "Pacific Islander" or bare-bones financial information on a form. It's not that race and class are always visible or (ha!) never sensitive. But think about this in terms what might constitute a privacy violation if shared about someone else. These are things about which someone has the option of not telling the entire world, and maybe they want to exercise that.

Giving these additional obstacles official recognition - as with scholarships - requires public (or quasi-public, if the funds are given somehow anonymously) admission of whichever obstacle, which is just plain going to be tougher to get in these cases than it is to convince someone whose obstacle is that their parents didn't go to college to put that on a form. Maybe you won't want to apply for the My Family Is Massively Dysfunctional Fellowship or the I'm Severely Deformed Under My Clothes Due To An Accident Scholarship, not because these weren't setbacks, but because that's not what you want to lead with in new situations. Or maybe whichever private trauma is too great for you to want to relive it by thinking about it, even if there's no line on your CV about it.

But there's also a third problem, which is that idiosyncratic obstacles are precisely the ones least likely to be overcome by throwing money at the problem. Obstacles not related to socioeconomic depravation are more likely to lead to things like lower grades and fewer extracurriculars than lower family income. Someone who faced terrible-but-unclassifiable obstacles as a child needs, I don't know, a GPA and SAT pseudo-boost, not necessarily a scholarship, any more than everyone does given what college costs these days.

Write what you know

Lena Dunham confirms what I've been saying since forever: everyone should wear eyeliner. It's always a good idea. Meanwhile, "Girls" advertises on Gawker, while Gawker has some fun at the very expensive expense of its creator. Dunham's zillion-dollar book proposal is probably designed to inspire but it's not fair from exactly the kind of people who will probably eventually pick up a copy at a Park Slope stoop sale, Housing Works booksale, or allow me to add some more NYC references so as to snag a deal like that myself, so as to parlay yet another Manhattan childhood and recent-college-grad-hood into a book to be foisted upon an audience whose eyes are already mid-roll. But that bores me even more than it does you. What's the market these days for a novel about life at a science institute in the woods of NJ? If there is one, then train-work needs to be more that, less dissertation.

Assorted injustices

-I'm not alone in protesting YPIS. I skimmed this on the train, but will need to investigate further.

-Rachel Hills continues to be fabulous, explains the Alexa Chung physique controversy to us all. This was my favorite part:

One of the misconceptions that skinny privilege relies on is that life is better when you’re thinner. It sustains itself on the belief that even the most incremental differences in size and shape will have a profound effect on how we are received; whether we will be rejected and passed over, or embraced and revered.

I couldn't agree with that more!

My only quibble is that while Chung is right that women should be judged more for brains and less for looks than is currently the case, this is a woman who is, among other things, a model. I don't think beautiful women are under any moral obligation to artificially experience life as the plain-looking do, as if this were even possible. But - barring human-trafficking-type situations - one makes a choice to be paid for one's looks. Models are certainly not directing societal beauty standards, but each woman who might have that job has decided that she will be the person with said features to do that job. Sure, if it hadn't been you, it would have been some other woman who looked just like you, but if it's you, it's you. It's wrong to judge a woman for being startlingly thin, but something else entirely to judge her for selling thin. This holds regardless of how she came to have that physique, regardless of how much effort or lack thereof went into it for her personally.


-NYC private schools, even more of a mess, diversity-wise, than the public magnets. Jenny Anderson's piece on what it's like to be a minority student at a Manhattan prep school is spot-on, or at least appears to be to me, as one of the not-as-rich white kids who attended one of those pre-high-school.

Anderson effectively conflates scholarship-kid with minority, which makes sense both from the stats she provides and in the context of these schools: there are special programs (such as Prep for Prep) that specifically recruit underprivileged, brilliant students of color. The way the admissions process works - how I remember it, and how the article portrays it - these schools have only rich and poor kids, with the handful of middle-class (lower- and upper-) effectively lumped in as "poor." The aloofness in question manifests itself as this overall sense that "we" are "normal" and anyone who has to god forbid attend a public school or take the subway might as well be featured on "Save the Children." This was mildly irritating for those of us who were merely upper-middle class, but often disastrous - as this article well shows - for kids whose families were actual-poor, as opposed to merely private-school poor. I allude to my own example not to summon tiny violins, but to explain what a weird atmosphere these schools create.

Anyway, it was obvious to all who were the scholarship students (even though some of the "rich" white kids received financial aid) because of the Prep for Prep influx in certain grades (7th and 9th). A new, smarter, darker-skinned kid in the class who didn't live in Manhattan-below-96th was readily identifiable. All of this culminated memorably one year when, apparently due to self-selection, one 10th-grade yearbook photo had only white kids, the other only students of color. This was NYC, in the 1990s. I was pleased to see Anderson pointing out that these schools are somewhat optimistic, deceptive, you choose, with their depiction of diversity in their promotional materials.

That American schools tend to remain de facto segregated is nothing specific to NYC's fanciest schools. Several factors make this case different (PG, take note), most obviously the near-absence of white people who aren't wealthy, and of students of color who aren't super-serious. The latter arguably promotes a positive stereotype - there's no broader stereotype in the U.S. that black and Latino kids, at least, are particularly studious, so if one emerges from this program, so it goes. But the former is more problematic. Yes, there's such a thing as "white privilege," but it doesn't generally come with, say, a Manhattan townhouse with its own elevator. The social gulf between (to simplify) blacks and whites is typically not what it is at a school where things are so extreme. Because private schools hand-pick their classes to contain only rich white kids and ridiculously impressive, bootstraps-story students of color, they manage to avoid having any kids who are, well, ordinary. That's just about the worst. But the absence of any kind of averageness makes for a screwy environment. As for what the stakes are of this arrangement, I suppose the problem with it is that if the goal is creating a diverse, integrated elite, it doesn't appear to be succeeding.

But what first jumped out at me was this:

There is no doubt that New York City’s most prestigious private schools have made great strides in diversifying their student bodies. In classrooms where, years ago, there might have been one or two brown faces, today close to one-third of the students are of a minority. During the 2011-12 school year, 29.8 percent of children at the city’s private schools were minority students, including African-American, Hispanic and Asian children [....]

Interesting, I think, that when we're discussing the city's private schools, Asians are considered a "minority" and perhaps even "brown," whereas the article about Stuyvesant from the very same NYT series mentions that the place is 72.5% Asian as a way of saying what a rich-and-fancy place it is. Which... seems kind of fair, considering this anecdote:

[Minority students] describe a racism that materializes not in insults, but more often in polite indifference, silence and segregation. Albert, an Asian-American boy in “Allowed to Attend,” says: “You can do a lot of psychological damage to people by ignoring them for an extended period of time. For, like, four years.”

It's striking, then, that Prep for Prep considers Asians "of color" - striking insofar as it tells us just how 1950s that world remains.

What's missing from this entire conversation is something like context. Not to keep harping on this, but harp I must: we're talking about how exclusive schools like Stuyvesant are because there exists a prep course that some take to get in, and it costs $750. A year - one year - at a private school is $40,000, which isn't counting the myriad official and unofficial activities fees. I get that in this country, we allow private educational institutions a great deal of leeway, homeschooling and all that, but I'm not convinced that as social-justice issues go, the public magnet schools' unrepresentativeness comes close to that of private schools' arrangement.

I'm still not convinced either private schools or public magnets are beneficial to society or to the individual students who attend, that the benefits aren't basically about which family you came from, which factors got you to that school in the first place. But what Stuyvesant manages and few other city schools do is socioeconomic diversity. Not "diversity" as in a handful of poorer kids to make up for the super-rich majority, and not "diversity" as a euphemism for everyone's really poor. "Diversity" as in you get the whole range. This is helpful in terms of having a sense of where you yourself stand, privilege-wise, and also in terms of not feeling like it's you against the world. It's far from perfect, but it's something.

Circular

I mean, why wouldn't one purchase a self-help book from someone who got $1 million or more to write one?

Random Lena Dunham question: much is made of her privilege, the nepotism angle, all that. But are her parents people we're supposed to have heard of if it weren't for Dunham? They are artists, they have whiteness-privilege, they live in some kind of lower-Manhattan loft, they aren't Mr. and Mrs. Joe the Plumber, I get it. But was this all, like, handed to her? This is a serious question (not enough so that I'll take time out of lesson-planning to Google it) because I want to know exactly how to feel about her stratospheric success.

Not under my roof

Parental support until age 18 and no later remains etched in cultural mythology, but fails to correctly describe expectations. The most obvious example of this is college. The FAFSA doesn't operate under the assumption that parental support ends at high school graduation. The expectation I'm referring to isn't that your parents will pay your tuition in full, that the parents of 19-year-olds can afford anything particular, but that it's appropriate to ask them to do so if they can, and that if they can, they will. If you're paying your own way, it's generally because you have to. Even if you're working 10, 20 hours a week, you're probably still a dependent. Parents who can afford to support their 19-year-olds but choose not to - not even to help with tuition at a less-expensive or scholarship-providing school - are not admired for teaching resilience, but considered borderline neglectful. There's an infrastructure in place, if a flawed one, for kids whose parents can't pay, but none for families who've decided that 18 is adulthood, period, principle-of-the-thing. OK, not none - there is the military. But none in civilian society.

Presumed dependence on parents extends further into adulthood, and is no longer exclusively for those who've fallen on hard times. Quite the contrary - many best-case-scenarios involve prolonged assumptions of parental support. If, for example, you wish to go to Harvard Law School, your parents' "resources" continue to enter into the equation until you're 29. The same appears to be true elsewhere as well. Brooklyn Law School takes it further: "Parents’ tax returns are required for all Need Grant applicants, regardless of age and circumstances." Presumably this means even if you're 45, going back to school, and haven't spoken to your parents in over 25 years. The FAFSA considers you an independent past 24, but the law school's own need-based financial aid assumes you don't need money if your parents have enough, or uses family income as a proxy for class. Although it's probably not as involved as all that, which is my point - parents probably are paying for their kids to go to law school. Assessing "need" on the basis of a 26-year-old's Teach for America income probably wouldn't point to the truth.

Unpaid internships - the only "job openings" at so many organizations these days - presumably assume that their unpaid employees are fed and housed, by someone. Even if the company never asks specifically about parents, even if some interns are paying their own way, parents are very much implied. If all unpaid interns were scrambling to work three jobs on the side, unpaid internships would not have proliferated. The assumption that parents are paying has fundamentally changed what it means to enter many careers. And yes, the economy also enters into it, but in the past, if a place didn't have much money to hire anyone, presumably they wouldn't hire anyone, or would hire just one person, as opposed to taking on several unpaid interns.

Planning on spending your pre-settled-down youth in New York? Working in a field other than finance? It will be presumed that your parents pay your rent. It will, which is part of why rents in the city are so outrageous. There's no presumption that the number of people making under $30k a year corresponds to the number of people renting apartments at rates appropriate for that income. Even if you find a place you can afford, landlords will be able to ask for - and get - either a parent-as-guarantor or several months rent upfront (likely borrowed from parents), just, you know, to be on the safe side. If neither of these will be options for you, you'll have to live somewhere far tinier and more out-of-the-way than you can afford, which, if you're not making much, means you'd better be OK with an hour-each-way commute from a closet.

How much parental support into is a phenomenon limited to certain segments of the population - and indeed which segments that is - I'm not sure. Not the entire country (so it's not necessary to comment here that this model does not apply if your parents work at Walmart and you do, too), but not just the Styles set, either. It most certainly doesn't only impact the class of people whose parents can afford to pay for their existences past 18, past 22. My point - to reiterate, perhaps re-reiterate - is not that everyone past 18, let alone anyone past 22, is supported financially by their parents. Rather, it's that this has become, for many, the assumed situation, while at the same time remaining very much unspoken. 25-year-olds whose parents pay their rent are not announcing this on Facebook.

There's a sense in which the new order actually promotes social mobility. If only kids and young adults whose families can't support them into adulthood get it together to find paying jobs, this leaves them ahead of, if not the kids with billion-dollar trust funds, perhaps the ones whose families can pay for a never-ending string of MA programs. Scholarships - grad or undergrad - look good on a CV, but if your parents are very generous, why fill out that Fulbright application? Meanwhile, at colleges that are not need-blind, simply being there and not paying the full ticket price is more impressive than the reverse, above and beyond the sense in which if two people are at the same college, the one who got there from a wealthier family is, all things equal, less impressive. Given that to be a fully autonomous individual, it helps if your parents don't have veto power over your decisions, if their role is reduced to that of advice-givers as opposed to under-my-roof-this-is-how-it-goes-declaration-makers, 25-year-olds who are supporting themselves may have a lower standard of living, but probably feel a good bit better about their lives than those who are not.

But overall, the longer parental support is presumed, the worse things go for the less-wealthy. As bad as it is to be 25 and still under the metaphorical parental roof, your life still governed by those who pay your bills, it's clearly worse still to be 25 and trying to make it in a system that assumes parental support that you're not getting. The presumption of parental support into adulthood ends up trickling down to those who have no such option, but who've bought into the idea that one simply must move to Brooklyn after college, do unpaid internships, etc. The opacity of this new order makes it so that you simply won't know - ever, or at least until arriving in whichever grad program, at whichever low-paid job - that many of your cohort are not living off their salaries.

So what's to be done? Unless there's a revolution, life will be different until 18 in wealthy families than poor ones. Private schools will go on existing, some neighborhoods will go on being safer than others, etc. And any kind of law telling parents how much they can hand over, and until what age, isn't feasible. And any movement on behalf of the theoretical rich kids whose parents cut them off would be beside the point, because a) that's not many people, b) these are people who still have cultural capital, perhaps enough to make up for what they lack in need-based scholarships and an ingrained work ethic.

What could change is, college could be funded by tax dollars, not tuition. This would still mean that wealthier parents would make greater contributions than poorer ones, but would change the structure according to which it's your parents paying - or not - your tuition. It would also mean that non-parents would be paying for college, as would the parents of kids who aren't college-bound, although more probably would be college-bound under this system. What would also likely occur is, the cost of running a college would drop, because things like perma-landscaping projects and state-of-the-art gyms would probably have to go. This is, however, never going to happen.

A big deal

You know when you find out that someone you went to high school with is now kind of a big deal? And you feel that special mix of excitement at having known them when (assuming this wasn't someone you remember disliking) and the horrible realization that it's been X years and your... deal isn't so immense? Up there today for that Facebook thing where everyone got billions of dollars or whatever was... yup. Front and center next to the most famous names, on the usual news sites, plus, because we are of course Facebook friends, the entirety of today's feed. I mean, "billionaire" is effectively incomprehensible to a humanities grad student. That's a whole lot of... asparagus? dry pasta? There are other uses for money? The incomprehensibility of sums like that, except in the context of, I don't know, GDP, aside, it's kind of cool to realize I was, I vaguely remember, kind of acquaintance-friends with this person. Less cool when I think of what the market value is of knowing a lot about nineteenth-century France, but cool all the same.

The art of the armpit

Continued: What does it mean for a man to be "beautiful"? As came up in the comments to my last post, there's a paradox: the more a man does with his appearance, the less appealing many women will find him. To give two examples:

-An obvious and relatively easy thing men can do with their appearances is mess with their facial and body hair. There is no consensus among women, however, that removing anything hair-wise makes a man more attractive. (Although there's probably some limited consensus regarding ponytails and very long beards.) To many women, any such alterations are worse than whatever back-hair-having state preceded them. I mean, I get that the man in the linked beauty-blog post is not looking to please women, but I suspect that many gay men, too, would find something like this a bit much: "I trim my underarm hair into shape—there’s an art to it, really." Gosh. To move to the less- rather than more-intimate end of things, there's the question of facial hair - some women like, some don't, some like some variants but not others. The "neck-beard" that so offends Britta probably reads as scruffy-intellectual-in-a-good-way to other women. And Britta's anti-unibrow stance is in fact a pro-eyebrow-shaping one, and some women find any evidence, however subtle, that a man owns tweezers kinda ick.

-A man who weighs 400 pounds will, all things equal, probably get ogled less than one at 200. And across all shapes, sizes, and gender identities, a partner who's active is generally preferable to one who finds reaching for the remote a bit too much effort. But as much as all those gym-going men would probably like to think it's a the-fitter-the-better situation, a six-pack is not something heterosexual women expect. And, as with the whole body-hair issue, finding that a man has put endless effort into his abdomen is going to be a happy surprise for some women, and off-putting to others. Why off-putting? Because it suggests male vanity, because it suggests a lack of personality/professional ambition, whatever, whether or not any of that is true in a particular case.

One way to look at this is to say that ingrained homophobia is what keeps women from wanting a man with a nicely-shaped brow, with glistening pecs, with makeup enhancing his features. That societal misogyny is behind the dichotomy between the dressed-up sorority girl and her rag-wearing frat-boy equivalent. Women are expected to do so much, men so little! Unfair! The patriarchy and all that.

Another, however, is to consider that the only beauty men are allowed in our society is natural beauty, i.e. that which cannot easily be altered, and that which, when altered, gets a man mockery, not admiration. Height? A tough one to fake. A full head of hair? Artifice can be spotted a mile away, and, unlike the hair extensions that give extra volume to so many women these days, is universally mocked. A short, bald man is usually going to be chosen over one with lifts and a wig... but not over a taller guy who goes through massive quantities of shampoo. A tall man with thick hair, broad shoulders, and even features need do nothing more than shower, shave (or keep a beard from reaching his knees), and get regular haircuts, and the ladies will swoon. A "naturally" beautiful woman still must do a great deal of primping to arrive at that same point of desirability, to reach that all-around "groomed" level that indicates femininity.

This is something that had been at the back of my mind for a while, in terms of what, exactly, I'm asking when I ask that women take male looks into account, or, rather, that women acknowledge, rather than suppress, this tendency. What am I asking that women asking of men? What am I asking, broadly speaking, of men? If male beauty is to become more important, how do we square that with there being not a whole lot the individual man can do to look good for more women than he already does?

This brings us back to the question of "natural" beauty in general - is it better for beauty to be a quality some just have, or that some just have for some, or for it to be something the individual can go out and get? On the one hand, it's awful to feel as though one must do X, Y, and Z, all of which are expensive, time-consuming, and no doubt loaded with carcinogens, in order to leave the house each morning. On the other, it's no fun to feel that one is locked into one's self-presentation, that qualities over which one has no control are the ones on which one is being judged. Consider, for example, blondness. Is it better if women feel they must bleach their hair to be thought attractive, or if the only women who are thought attractive are of Nordic extraction or look that way?

Obviously, it's better if beauty gets to be subjective, if a wide range of appearances are thought beautiful by some, and if everyone gets to be with someone with whom there is this subjective mutual attraction. It's also, of course, better if people get some control over their looks, insofar as they can present themselves as part of whichever subculture or "type" they identify with, and to use their looks to attract the sort of partners they seek. I don't know how to make that happen, and am not so terribly optimistic.

Further thoughts on the behavior of Abs Millepied

Much is being made of the fact that Natalie 'stole' he of the French abs and endless legs away from a ballerina girlfriend with whom things were quite serious. Yeah, but not that serious, and I say this as someone at the abs-and-girlfriend life-stage, in other words as someone more inclined than most to think several years of cohabitation is different from several dates, even if both might confer "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" titles.

But that's the least of it. I mean, if you're going to be dumped, what reason, other than 'I'm actually of a sexual orientation that prevents this from working out', could be so not-insulting as 'I had a chance with Natalie Portman'? It's certainly better than 'I'm running off with a much younger version of you, while you're off bragging about being married to me on a Bravo reality show.' Or than being just run-of-the-mill rejected - for someone seemingly comparable, or for no one in particular, because alone is better than paired off with you. I mean, especially if you're a petite brunette of a certain type, you know any boyfriend or husband (probably girlfriend or wife too, but I'm not sure the appeal carries over) you'll ever have would pull a Millepied if his new co-worker were a leotard-wearing Natalie.

As far as I'm concerned, not knowing the couple or the particulars, the ballerina ex can hold her head high (metaphorically, that is - given her career, her posture is likely not a problem), and can comfort herself with the knowledge that she's better-positioned than most to find an equally ab-having replacement. (If she hasn't done so years ago - I feel like this is all old news that's come up again because of Natalie's Big Surprise.)

A follow-up

The model-off-duty-as-fashion-inspiration-for-us-all trend has seriously gone too far. Wow! A black jacket, white t-shirt, and jeans! I bet if I made the same style choices, I'd look just like her! But wait! I wear the same thing every day! How can it be? Must be her accessories... In other news, that Fashionista post has just told me which model it was who took my spot on the bench in front of a certain Nolita coffee bar not long ago. (If she's 19, let's just call me Elena Kagan minus the accomplishments and be done with it.)

Automatic self-esteem-reducing article linked to below:

You know who has a tough time of it? Harvard undergrads who are also professional models. All that multitasking. (Via.)

On getting out of bed for less than $10,000 a day

Finally, someone interviewed in the NYMag series that asks (minor) celebrities "Would you still live here on a $35,000 salary?" offers the perfect answer: "I think I may already."

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Uniqlo is, I'm starting to think, leading an organized effort to drain my bank account. I went today to pick up the (sensible! practical!) black corduroy pants I got last week and that had been hemmed, and had to imagine that I was in the store with blinders on. Today I noticed these, in black, which are currently going for $10 off the price this link lists. Tempting, but too close to harem pants to be justified as something I'd wear for more than five minutes. But then there were black leggings with white stars on them, and tank tops with the same pattern. Space-age! But no. I'm also starting to think that the main advantage of getting an $85 haircut is my subsequent shame at even the thought of any other non-grocery purchases for a while to come.

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School anxiety dreams never end. I'm auditing a class this semester, but officially finished with coursework, and yet still, I find a way. In the latest incarnation, the course I teach started at 3:15pm, but I was still in my office, still waiting to print out my lesson plan, at 3:26 (yes, this precise)... only to discover that I had no idea what floor of the building my classroom was on. Only as I begun to wake up did I realize I teach in a different building than my office is in; it took being fully awake to realize that a) my office is not located in my freshman-year dorm, nor in my first-grade classroom, b) that I do not teach at 3:15; and c) most importantly, that I have not in fact forgotten to teach a class, not now, not ever. Of course, in the dream, the class was the one I teach in real life, with the same students, lesson plan, material, and so forth, so even once I awoke, I was vaguely concerned I'd left a classroom full of students waiting. Did I show up extra early today? You bet I did.

Umlauts, humidity, and the subway

Internet has, I believe definitively, arrived in my apartment, but not without the usual last-minute surprise-maybe-you-won't-be-getting-Internet-after-all-because-your-apartment-is-in-fact-cursed near-misses. But so far, so good. I went fashion-blog crazy for surprisingly not that long (although I remain star-struck from having glimpsed one of my favorite fashion bloggers in, of all places, the basement of Uniqlo - I of course was too much of a coward/blasé New Yorker to say anything), before I tired of my old-new toy and went back to Madame de Staël and her umlaut, Simone de Beauvoir and her particule. Ça continue...

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The first day of the new haircut has proven that even the best of haircuts do not stand up to the tests of unseasonably warm and humid weather. What had yesterday resembled the style Natalie Portman had in the ads for "Closer" looked, after a trip to the by-then picked-over Tribeca Greenmarket, more like a particularly windswept Christiane Amanpour.

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Alert the presses: I have come up with yet another complaint about New York life:

People who take the subway with a friend/relative/co-worker but refuse to sit next to that person, even when two seats next to each other are available. Such individuals insist upon chit-chat with their companions, but seem to fear that if their thighs were adjacent, they would somehow be overcome with a sexual-orientation-, incest-taboo-, or office-romance-policy-violating case of lust. Their phobias translate to a lack of adjacent empty seats for those lacking that particular neurosis, who indeed do want to sit with the person they're traveling with. But they also make it so that solo travelers have to sit in the middle of a conversation that will, like all conversations on the subway, be either in a language no one else in the car understands; about something of no possible interest to someone who does not work in that particular office/attend that particular high school; or both. Obviously the fact that these anti-socials do not refuse to sit next to strangers suggests that their fear is not touching somebody - and, say, contracting a cold or flu - but touching somebody they know. They will often even sit especially close to the stranger sitting next to them, so as to better hear what their companion is saying. Basically, this behavior has to stop.

Boo!

I'd thought the worst time to catch a cold was right before taking a transatlantic flight. (See: mid-August.) But no, the worst time to catch a cold is when your apartment does not (yet?) have TV or Internet. This makes the much-needed distractions impossible, and doesn't make ordering in soup any easier, either. While I attempted to romanticize the situation, thinking of myself as a languid 19th-century malade, I was unable to convince myself that the situation was (oh, is) anything other than pathetic. Although I have made it to campus, where there not only is Internet, but are also instructions everywhere on how to cough:



What I'd like are instructions on how to teach a foreign language with a voice that kind of comes and goes, but that might be too department-specific.

That's it for whining for now. Back to usual programming sometime soon.

More complaints

-What exactly is going on with the 'newly renovated' Bobst bathrooms? Is there some reason for the flooding? Is the beginning of the year really the best time to shut down half the bathrooms? Hmm?

-Campus is semi-shut-down because, according to a police officer I asked, Obama is having lunch in a restaurant. Alrighty then. We all need to eat.

-After learning about the Obama-Thompson-Street conundrum, an older woman grabbed my arm and asked me, "Sweetie, do you go here?" Being accosted on the street is always unnerving, and if I had the advantage of relative youth, she had that of Julia Child-esque proportions. I suddenly regretted my backpack and otherwise undergraddish appearance - would she have stopped a me in a suit in this manner? Have all my attempts at being more chic this semester added up to looking more like a style-conscious freshman than is typically the case? But I said yes, because even an ancient fourth-year grad student 'goes to' a university, and because yes, I do know where one can buy NYU clothes if one so chooses, which seemed to be what this woman wanted to know.

'Silence!' she screamed

It's all well and good to give the undergrads a tour of the library along with an explanation of its rules. But when doing so, it might make sense not to shout an in-depth explanation of these rules in the middle of the day, in a quiet and student-full part of the library, where certain frugal graduate students trying to spend less at the bookstore have books out on two-hour reserve - whole books meant to be consumed and critically analyzed in two hours - and would like nothing more than to be left in peace. Or if you're going to do so, at least pretend to acknowledge to collective glare the students you've interrupted are tossing in your direction.

In other, less hater-ish news, I'm tempted to give kale another try after reading this (possibly ripped off, according to commenters) recipe. I'm assuming that if all the regular salad greens at the Tribeca Whole Foods look pathetic, that's probably the case city-wide, and I'll have to expand my horizons. And with enough olive oil and ricotta salata, my horizons are, I'd imagine, infinite.

Racists, carbon monoxide, and other unpleasantness

The powers that be clearly, clearly do not want me to ever finish up my last semester of coursework. I'm a few edits away from done with my last term project of grad school, so of course the jury duty gods should pick this as the time to drag me to downtown Brooklyn. Which isn't so bad. What is so bad is the mysterious carbon monoxide presence in my apartment. Dashing firefighters aside, not fun.

There was going to be a weekend roundup of crazy racists reported about in the Times - the segregated prom in Georgia (in which white racists worry about whatever might happen if their pure, innocent daughters - some of whom look remarkably like Vegas showgirls - were permitted to attend a formal dance with black male classmates) and the American Girl Jewish doll that has to have light brown rather than dark brown hair because apparently to give a Jewish doll dark brown hair is akin to posing it hunched over, grasping for a coin with a claw-like hand, so harmful and stereotyping it is to depict an Ashkenazi Jew with the coloring they themselves admit is typical of Ashkenazi Jewry... but that's all the roundup I can muster. People=big racists. My apartment=bad news. Jury duty=at least near some good grocery shopping.

Wanty list

These sandals.

These sunglasses. Anyone know where they come from?

This elbow-patch plaid shirt, if it came in a size smaller than Men's Medium.

A drivers' license. (Sniff.)

Fail

Following the shameful tradition of the likes of Cher Horowitz, I just failed my first road test. Didn't hit anything, parked fine, three-point-turned fine, but apparently the seemingly basic tasks of making left and right turns at intersections are beyond what I'm capable of. Not 'apparently' - I knew this, but since I decided to take the test after taking half the recommended amount of lessons, and without being shall we say unusually talented at driving, I did kind of bring this upon myself.

What's frustrating about this is that here I am in my 1,000,000th year of school, so used to studying for tests, and here's one I can't study for! Each 'study session' is a lesson, which not only must be done at a location that's neither my apartment nor the library, with an instructor, but which costs... let's just say it will be a long time before I buy anything non-essential without heaps and heaps of guilt. And this driving school, or so says Yelp, is relatively inexpensive.

All that needs to happen is, I need to drive around the block, many, many times, which doesn't sound like it should be such a production. But does anyone I know in NYC have a car? It's looking like not. (To those who have offered to teach me to drive, but who either do not have cars or do not live in NYC, much appreciation, but lessons it is.)

In which I overuse italics

Is it a good thing that selective colleges promise to judge their applicants 'as individuals'? Give your answer, then, if you have time, read the babbling that follows. (Or read the babbling first, it's not as though I'll know either way.)

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On the one hand, maybe it's a good thing that colleges look for 'well-roundedness.' Even if the emphasis on extracurricular activities, on going beyond tests-and-grades, is rooted in home-grown American anti-Semitism, perhaps there's something to be said for admitting students to college in part on the basis of whether they get along with others well enough to work a part-time job or play a team sport. On the other, there is something upsetting about the idea that a college rejects a student not on the basis of the materials they sent in, but of an admissions committee's 'holistic' assessment of each applicant as a person.

The notion that applicants are selected 'as individuals' is related but not identical to the question of 'well-roundedness'. A school could, in theory, choose applicants on the basis of more than just their GPAs and SATs, looking also at activities outside the classroom, without claiming to know each applicant personally. But that's not what the schools do. From my own alma mater's admissions website: "Our goal in the admissions office is to extend our knowledge of a student well beyond a test score or GPA and understand, as much as possible, that student’s personal and academic qualities." And, "Above all we look for the intense curiosity that makes University of Chicago students such exciting young scholars in our intense academic community, and such lively members of campus, neighborhood, and city. This quality does not manifest itself in high test scores, but in writing that is willing to take chances, in recommendations that speak to a love of learning and active engagement in the classroom, and in the selection of a strong curriculum." (Emphasis added.) It's not merely that factors beyond SAT and GPA come into the decision. It's that miraculously, when you combine SAT, GPA, sports-team membership, and the impressions of someone's high school teachers, you have looked into their very soul.

I get why this approach is supposed to reassure applicants. After getting back a test and seeing a D in red ink, no one wants to think that that particular grade decided their life for them. Along those lines, a student with some Ds and some As might find it unfair that he is judged on the basis of the Ds, when his As are in the classes that he most enjoys. Where it matters, he's an A student, so as a person, that's who he is. Granted a straight-A student would find it unfair if colleges considered her classmate, Mr. As-and-Ds, her academic equivalent. Luckily for her, all things equal, they do not. But when Mr. As-and-Ds sees, on a college website, that they want to get to know him as a person, not a number, his confidence grows, as does his good feeling towards the school in question.

Though heart-warming to applicants, there are two glaring problems with the 'as a person' approach. But before getting to those, I should point out that the problem is most definitely not the reason most often given for it being a problem, namely that the approach destroys what would otherwise be a near-flawless meritocracy. No system that measures 'achievement' of 17-year-olds will ever come close. In a critique of admissions committees choosing to abandon standardized tests, Mary Grabar argues that the tests must remain, because grades don't necessarily tell you who are the best students. She writes: "Subjective factors can come into play. For example, women, who now make up about 60% of the college student body, on the average have better study habits and behavior than men, which can earn them higher grades." No, I'm afraid I'm not seeing how classroom conduct and preparation for exams are "subjective factors."* After all, colleges are looking for those who promise to be the best students - which includes but is not limited to innate intelligence - not those who would in theory be best at math but who in reality spent their time in math class playing games on their calculators.

OK, so, onto the problems. One is that, simply put, no selective college can get to know each applicant as a person. Your roommate once you get to college, that's someone you get to know 'holistically', for better or worse. Schools claiming to 'get to know' each applicant (and they're all, to my knowledge, making variants of this claim) are, I think, being somewhat dishonest. I say 'somewhat' because I don't question the hard work they put into assessing each candidate on the basis of all materials submitted. What I question is their assertion that the decision they reach has to do with a whole person, not with an applicant.

The other, to my mind more important, mistake is that the blow to one's ego one receives upon being rejected from, say, Harvard (to pick a school to which I've never applied, grad or undergrad) on account of being insufficient as a person is not only far greater than the one you face if told your grades, scores, and sports achievements were not enough, but is also unnecessarily insulting. If the materials you submitted showed that your achievements as they pertain to admissions to a particular college didn't add up, that's what they call constructive criticism. You can shape up and apply places as a transfer student. You can do well wherever you go to undergrad and go to a top grad school. You can accept that Harvard is not in store and excel at something for which a Harvard degree would be of no use. But if it's you, as a person, who proved inadequate, lacking in intellectual curiosity, in drive, in that certain undefinable something, what can you do? Rather than acknowledging some higher truth beyond each applicant's grades and scores, the 'holistic' approach in fact ensures that students feel they are their grades and scores, that nothing about them went unexamined by the admissions committee, and that they, well, pretty much suck at life. Not, I think, the optimal situation.

*I will not speculate further, but perhaps a conservative article on higher ed must attribute female achievement to 'subjective' factors, because god forbid it turns out women, if given an equal playing field, actually do better at something than men.