A strong contender for most productive day ever:

-Did more grading than I would have thought possible when teaching one section of about 16 students, plus various other teaching duties where applicable. Anything's possible! After an iced cappuccino with two sugars.

-Booked a headshot appointment (finally).

-Set up a spreadsheet (as vs. a bare-bones Google Doc) for freelancing payments.

-Ordered the second Neapolitan novel. Ferrante... It took a while to get into Book 1, but then I couldn't put it down.

-Came up with a grand theory (actually, two) about why the neighborhood where Clinton did best is the good old Upper East Side. (If anyone should know...)

Day in review

-Slept in.
-Dressed up (that is, wore my better workout-wear) for the elliptical machine, on which I enjoyed some Proust, by which I mean "Millionaire Matchmaker."
-Tried to try out the hipster coffee shop in Highland Park, only to drive the 45 minutes or so and find it closed for maintenance.
-Drove an additional few minutes to Edison for Paris Baguette, which was no great sacrifice. The berry-custard tart is if anything better than it looks.
-Did some work once the wireless kicked in.
-Took note of the excellent highlights on some of my fellow (similarly-dark-haired) customers. Contemplated asking them where one goes to get this done. Decided against - I'm too much looking forward to getting this done in Williamsburg (when? who knows), inconvenient though that may be.
-Bought a milk bread. That it can be done at home doesn't meal I'm about to do it.
-Ate tremendous amounts of hot-pot at Little Sheep. (I can't decide if it's very American or very not American that I suggested this dinner option because it's in the same strip mall as we'd already parked in for Paris Baguette. Lazy, yes, but also a case of reluctance to drive.) Noted to self to skip the tofu skin next time (yuba it's not), but to double up on pea shoots.
-Drove back in the dark, in the rain. Whined about the difficulty of seeing the lane lines. Accepted assessment that my apparent ability to stay in the lane just fine the entire time suggested that I could, in fact, see the lane lines. Drove a good bit under many a speed limit along the way. Got passed on the right.
-Woohoo!

Japanese canine dreamscape

Heaven is indeed a place on earth. It seems to be somewhere in Japan, but is at any rate wherever Flickr user koumeno-osanpo is taking these amazing photos. Life seems to involve frolicking in a springtime field with longhaired dachshunds (sometimes in Breton-striped shirts!) and a little gray poodle. Also meeting up with other similar lap dogs (including more dachshunds, more poodles) in other bucolic settings. Also visiting Japanese cafés. There are also fluffy cats, kittens, strawberries, sheep. Pasta. A deer. If this all sounds overly cutesy, it's... surprisingly not. It's some kind of aesthetic perfection.

Firsts

-First near-miss with a deer. As in, I was driving at night, and one pranced into the road in front of the car. Luckily it was just a 35 mph road, and I saw it in time to slow down a bit before coming to a full stop. If I hadn't slowed down that soon, though, I would have hit it, which was already unnerving. As I expected, its extended deer-family was waiting back on the side of the road that it had come from. Whether the family was able to reunite without incident I couldn't say - there are too many deer-crashes for those to make the news. The deer are just... everywhere. A little later on the same trip, I saw a car stopped on the opposite side of the road, for another deer, separate from this group.

They're gorgeous creatures, and do generally bring out my inner squeamishness vegan, but given that their numbers seem to lead to gory scenes for deer and human alike, maybe some middle-ground could be reached involving venison (which I've heard is delicious) and leather goods?  

-First attempt at making layer cake. And, my driving is better than my baking. Frustrated with the entire baking process taking three times longer than I'd thought, I iced the (misshapen) result while it was still warm, with predictable results, namely the "layer" icing melted. It now looks like a layer cake exploded in the refrigerator, where the entire thing is chilling. Tastes pretty good, though, as combinations of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs generally do.

-First and last purchase of "lemon verbena" Method kitchen spray. Had this been an online purchase, I'd have learned about the lingering smell that reviewers accurately describe as "urine." Instead, it was a case of needing kitchen spray urgently post- pre-entertaining cleaning marathon, and being in Whole Foods at the time, which is never the place for that sort of thing, but so it went. And this spray doesn't even get anything clean! Whatever it is, it better be something that transcends non-toxic. It better actively increase your well-being. Which in a sense it might, if you're someone who needs to be eating less. It's more or less impossible to get down a meal off a plate that's on a table that was wiped down with this stuff.

8bre

OK, so it's lovely and convenient and wonderful (if unfortunate for those now applying for grants to do research in Croissantsville) that the BNF (French national library) has digitized just about everything. And it's delightful that you can (kind of) search the documents themselves. But would it be too much to ask for those who label the documents not to hand-scribble the identifying information, such that it's one bad xerox or whatever away from complete incomprehensibility? I'd found all of this neat info. (about an author my advisor had suggested I look at, and she was so very right), but wasn't sure if it could ultimately end up in my dissertation, because bits and pieces of identifying information were missing. Important ones, like which date of which publication something came from. (Year and author I knew, and I could see that there was a month ending in -bre, which only just narrowed things down.) Footnote formatting is one thing, but my understanding of research is, the thing you cite needs to be identifiable beyond 'page 302 of some PDF.'

Despair, despair, until the deadline adrenaline kicked in, and I figured out the mystery scribbler's system. If I didn't find this, it wasn't going in. I first sorted out which documents were in the PDF - that is, what the possible dates might be. (A few months were possible; it's not like there was a table of contents or anything remotely of that nature.) This confirmed the -bre but wasn't otherwise helpful. Then I had the brilliant (i.e. in retrospect obvious) idea to look at preceding entries (the PDF's a mishmash of documents), and found that they were indeed in chronological order. Moreover, I saw that Monsieur or Madame or Mademoiselle the scribbler would alternate between "octobre" and a messy version of "8bre." The famous -bre, at last! Making the mysterious 48th of mystery month, 1882, October 4, 1882.

I can't begin to convey the sense of triumph/relief I felt when I finally sorted that out.

"Public transportation arrivistes"

In case you were wondering, the true victims of Hurricane Sandy were not those whose homes were destroyed. Nor were they those who simply didn't have power for a week and then spent much of a semester attempting to commute on a quasi-defunct New Jersey Transit. No, the ones for whom we must shed a tear are Hamptons residents who must now share their precious beaches with displaced Joisey beach-goers. NIMBY, kind of, but a glossier one than most.

As Jim Rutenberg's "styles style" article makes clear, the line between nouveau and old-veau in those parts has long been kind of fluid. The same could of course be said of American "aristocracy" more generally. It's always been nouveau, money-based. From "Real Housewives" to more understated rock-star-and-model offspring to the slightly more distant descendants of tycoons, it's all basically the same, in a way that's more obvious than Old World aristocracy, which can be plausibly imagined to be eternal. And the Hamptons specifically have been glitzy since forever. Those who wanted a world of relatively-old-money American elites - or just nature - have long been going elsewhere.

Which doesn't stop each level of the Hamptons got-there-first hierarchy from thinking they're the only ones who belong:

Mr. Rattray is the fifth member of his family to edit the newspaper over the span of three generations, with roots in the community since the 1600s. “To us it’s one big blur of people from ‘away,’ ” he said. “That fear of Snooki thing may be the last people in pulling the ladder up behind them.”

Alas, Rutenberg doesn't track down someone (presumably in England?) to whom the Rattrays are a caste of untouchables. But you just know that person is out there.

Quote of the day

"She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger." - Margalit Fox on the late Helen Gurley Brown.

The evolution of prep

-Last night I went with a group of mathematicians, physicists, etc. to a karaoke night at the bar in town. If grad students have a reputation among undergrads for being the out-of-place old folks at campus social events, where does that leave postdocs-and-same-age-significant-others? Before we headed out, we all made sure we had ID... only to be the one group not carded at the door. A sign at the door indicated that you needed to have been born in 1991 to enter. Weird, because it's 1997. Except, wait a moment...

The night was plenty of fun, but it at times felt as though we were crashing a frat party. These were the fittest, tallest, preppiest undergrads I'd ever seen, and they were in the process of something I'd only ever read about: the college hook-up culture. I kind of identified with Dan Savage on "Savage U," as though I were at the bar not to drink an entire beer and be asked by a mathematician I'd just met whether I was Scandinavian (first time for everything!), but to help The Youth sort out their love lives. Which isn't really my thing - as an instructor of undergrads, even if not these particular undergrads, I have the usual grad-student wariness of being out socially among them.

-Not to tread on Flavia's turf, but there's something - an Edith Wharton novel? a backstory to the Susan Ross character from "Seinfeld"? - in this obituary of an 104-year-old alum of the girls' school I attended for K-8:

She was almost certainly the last link to New York's Gilded Age. The daughter of copper baron [so and so], she was born in Paris the youngest of seven children. In 1928 at the age of 22, [she] was briefly married to [so and so], a business associate of her father's. After the couple was formally divorced in 1930, [she] lived with her mother and spent her time painting, playing the harp and maintaining her extensive doll collection. 

Cross-dressing at the Gap

Now that it's stopped raining, and that the graduation-and-wedding festivities have concluded, the Belgians returned to the land of superior food quality, I've up and caught a bizarre cough-first cold, and have lost my voice. (Possible germ source: the adorable bichon who lives in our building, who ran up to me recently and gave me a surprise big kiss on the mouth. I did not mention this theory at Student Health, for fear of them putting "Another Insane Grad Student" in my file, if they hadn't already.) The whole seeing-NY-friends-and-profs bit will have to wait.

What has not waited: a quest for jeans that are not stretch pants. (Also: that don't leak dye even after many washes, and that don't show too much in the rear when I sit down.) Apparently all jeans on the market today have spandex or similar in them. Jeans made for women, that is. All-cotton exists for men and children - the Gap men's ended up fitting me better than kids' - oddly enough, the latter was a bit too big, the former, in the size I tried, a bit too snug. Overall, men's seemed the way to go, until, doing that test one does with jeans to make sure they're not too low in the back or tight in the waist, I sat down in them and discovered that there was indeed some, uh, extra fabric. No thanks. The only women's jeans in the entire universe that are not "stretch" come from American Apparel, and they were, I promise, the least flattering item of clothing I'd ever tried on, ever. (A.P.C. also has all-cotton, also - how lovely - without those streaks added to make jeans look worn, but $175...) In principle, I favor clothes that can be kept even when one changes size. In practice, I'd rather approach this by owning a pair a bit on the large size and not worrying about perfect fit than via jeggings.

Also: it's been years and years, so my once-vivid memories of going to elementary and middle school with the rich and famous are now a hazy blur that even the slice(s) of Pintailes I had the other day was not enough to summon all madeleine-like. Speaking of literature, one of my classmates from those days has a new novel out, with a co-writer, yes, but any book that takes the Fifi Meltzer of the Upper West Side approach to autobiographical fiction is surely from the heart. Things like this make me think I should follow through on those rare occasions when book agents read this ol' thing and think there's a book in me yet - one other than my dissertation, that is. I even have a new idea! It's about a young woman named Fifi who... no, it's actually just a popular-audience-intended version of one aspect of my dissertation, which is only vaguely autobiographical.

Ostentatious relative asceticism

What are we calling the genre of, outlandish rich-person behavior exposed, with the express purpose of eliciting comments from readers who are all in a race to announce how not-fancy and not-schmancy they are, unlike some people? Exhibit A: this Jezebel post about expensive prom dresses. (No, I did not watch the video. I was already aware that some girls spend this much on prom, I think from reading about it before, not even that long ago, on Gawker or Jezebel.) The commenters are all delighted with themselves for having spent less than $3,000 on prom. Bonus points if thrift stores, part-time jobs, or DIY sewing projects are mentioned, but even just having spent $300 on a dress from the mall is cause for celebration. The entire thread is just this list of $80, $100, $10 and we have a winner!

So I came up with CCOA, YPIS, and scrappiness oneupmanship, but on this I'm drawing a blank. What do we call this phenomenon? ORA is an option, but it's not exactly "asceticism." "Frugality" doesn't quite get at it, either, because it needs to be not that you chose not to spend thousands of dollars on your prom experience, but that you couldn't afford to do so. This needs to be presented in such a way as to suggest that the norm is to be able to afford the $3,000 prom prep, but that you, scrappy, unique, could not. But I do like the sound of ORF.

Don't try this in the dorm

By "this" I mean read the academics-who-study-France listserve's Housing Digest. It is, like so many Woody Allen movies, real estate porn. Even the tiniest studio walk-ups sound so delightful. But oh, the sprawling 2,000-euro-a-month ones... And someone renting out an estate in the South of France...

Life of a princess

-I had a little chit-chat with the janitor assigned to my floor, and he agreed to put soap in the container in the bathroom! All you have to do is ask, I thought, patting myself on the back metaphorically... just as he told me that he was happy to provide us with soap, but that it was broken. The soap dispenser, I thought. No, the sink. No water. What with the lack of soap, I had not been trying this sink - an option now that I once again have a room with a working one - so this was news to me. There is now, however, a whole lot of soap in the communal container. One step at a time...

-Who'd have thunk? The Alliance Israélite library is located in Paris's "Bobo Heaven." Somehow I've managed to spend heaps of time there without ever noticing anything bobo or heavenly about the area. OK, there was this one lemon tart that qualifies as the latter.

-So many daughters of Jewish bankers, so very many penniless aristocrats, so little time.

-And, uh, sheesh!

-Why is this so can't-look-away? This installment especially. Part of me is proud of spending far less time and money on a beauty routine that's far more visible (aka black eyeliner, pink or "nude" lipstick, concealer; the last of those is at least meant not to show), but another small, nagging bit is wondering whether maybe The Glamorous Woman spends a ton on creams and potions that do not produce a made-up look, just an all-around enviable lifestyle. I did succumb to curiosity and get La Roche-Posay waterproof eye makeup remover (and whoa, no more dry eyelids!), as well as "Effaclar" frite-induced-acne-fighting face-wash by the same brand, and I spent last weekend in a chateau, not a dorm. Related? Who can say?

#Smugbook

Self-portrayal on the Internet, even before Facebook took over, has long been very best-foot-forward. We hear about professional and social successes, not unfortunate pimples or disinvitations, exclusions or rejections. We hear about a love of Proust, not the three pages of Proust read for every ten hours of "Two and a Half Men" watched. It's not that people don't behave this way in life, but failings are harder to hide in person, and self-deprecation is more complicated to convey in text, and so isn't bothered with so much online, or if it is, it's in a way that can't possibly be misconstrued as admitting to failures.

The capacity of Facebook to make everyone feel like an unaccomplished hermit has inspired academic research, which in turn inspired Slate to inspire its readers to spontaneously, using the Twitter function I don't entirely understand of pressing the pound key and thus tagging posts, "submit" times when Facebook ("#sadbook") made them sad. (Somehow it makes sense that Facebook would be worst offender here, given that part of its appeal originally was that everyone on it seemed to go to a more elite school than one's self.)

So it's funny to see that the examples Twitter-submitted in to Slate, or the ones they picked, are not only, as they admit, poor examples of the phenomenon ostensibly being discussed, but also examples of the senders making themselves look good. "It should be said that many of the #sadbooks have nothing to do with social networking comparisonitis; they’re commentaries on bad spelling, on the boneheaded ways people treat each other online, and on the pathos you can often glimpse in the cracks of our networked lives." Gar! People simply cannot portray themselves negatively or even neutrally online, even if the point of the exercise is to portray one's self negatively online.

Onto the list:

When your 70-year-old dad shows up as "someone you might know."

Yes, it's weird when Facebook and family meet, unsettling for the young that the not-so-young know how to use computers, amusing, but not upsetting, when it's suggested a parent is Someone You Might Know. A better "Someone You Might Know" complaint would have been the tendency of that feature to attempt to reintroduce exes, friends of exes, and acquaintances one has felt snubbed by socially or professionally. This example reveals smugness about one's relative youth, and that one finds one's father cute-in-a-spry-old-relative-way. If the issue was that he's estranged, that, and not his age, would be mentioned.

Not sending friend requests to people from high school who were popular just in case they still think they're too good for me.

Acceptable. Someone, somewhere, understood the exercise. Extra points for feeling bad about one's self in a way that harkens back to adolescent misery.

Photo albums consisting of nothing but selfshots taken in the bathroom.

Yes, it's long been socially unacceptable to take a bathroom-mirror (and yes, my own Twitter photo is in intentional disregard for this rule), whether because it implies one does not have anyone to take one's picture (although cameras can have timer functions) or because it's a cliché. Either way, the person made "sad" by seeing such an album is actually feeling smug that his own albums depict a life more social and/or original.

When the whole of the "friendship" is a repeated "Let's meet for coffee sometime."

This is a way that Facebook directly mimics off-line life - the "let's do lunch" acquaintances with whom it is mutually agreed one will never get lunch. Such encounters are if anything part of a vibrant social or professional life - both parties agree that they are too busy for the other. Slight caveat: the acquaintance/casual friend who gets in touch after a lag that was based on mutual apathy, who profusely apologizes for having been so busy, who offers a list of the fabulous ways in which he's been occupied, who promises to make it up, who feels so so bad, is maybe just playing a variant of let's-do-lunch played among those close enough, but just, to occasionally get lunch, but is mostly just setting things up, #sadbook-style, as though the other party has been waiting by the phone the whole time. So perhaps "let's do lunch" on Facebook, under certain conditions, can be insulting, but in general, it's if anything a sign that one's socializing and/or networking is normal as can be.

Noticing that one person in a group photo isn't tagged makes me sad. Who are they? Why won't anyone tag them?

Also smug (because who but an always-tagged who's interpreting having been tagged as some kind of social affirmation would object?) but mostly just odd. Maybe the person untagged himself? Maybe you, the viewer, are not among the set selected by the "untagged" individual to view his photos? Indeed, this might have been spun as an excellent #sadbook if the viewer wondered neurotically why he didn't make it past this acquaintance's privacy filter.

An entire generation is going to grow up totally unaware that an ellipsis is only 3 periods ... not 16.

Where curmudgeonly meets smug.

People who announce their divorce by changing their relationship status to "single."

Not even sure what this one means. Maybe someone told those close to them that their marriage wasn't working out years prior, but you the casual acquaintance are only finding out now? Maybe people who are single wish to make that fact known to potential dates, and the only thing weird about it is that they're coming out of a marriage and not a three-week-long fling, which for those of us who got to know Facebook as college students might seem like a misuse of the site. At any rate, this particular complaint reads as though it comes from someone Bridget Jones would call a "smug married," or at the very least someone smug in whatever relationship status they have in life and, if they put one, on Facebook................ or perhaps just smug in having not been so crass as to put that information on the site.

The song that my close friend has referenced in his status update is by Nickelback.


Not a band I'd ever heard of, but I'm assuming from the context that this falls under the category of smug ('I have musical taste') with a hint of made-for-the-Internet self-deprecation ('can you believe I'm friends with someone like that?')

This is such a missed opportunity. Keeping the examples to those relevant to my own milieu and age group, the possibilities are endless. Grad students gaze longingly at the lives of Real Job-havers, while those with real jobs get to hear about grad students' semesters spent dunking croissants (does one dunk croissants?) in Paris. Or a romantic-issues example - one of my Facebook friends just posted something about how the ads she gets on the site are for wedding caterers, because she is after all a grown woman In a Relationship with a man. So true! Meanwhile, those who are getting married or have recently can (as Flavia pointed out) look at all the fun singles are having. Or they can just feel bad about themselves by looking at the wedding albums of friends of friends, whose loving families, rich or good-looking new spouses, or 500 adoring best friends will play into whichever insecurities fit. But no. This would require copping to insecurity online, which is unacceptable.

Sprees real and imaginary

Dream shopping list:

-The Stella McCartney llama shirt. (Yes, Kids', but do they make llama shirts for grown-ups?)

-Knee-patch riding breeches, to wear as pants.

-A "bento box" apartment in Noho.

-A professional haircut. (It's been six months, and it shows.)

Real shopping list:

-Body wash and assorted still-less-exciting purchases, Duane Reade.

-Parmesan to replace what I used up in the Bittman-gnocchi marathon and assorted less-exciting groceries, Whole Foods.

-A second attempt at paying a bureaucratic fee, to see if this one's the charm and I get to go back to Frahnce.

-The llama shirt. If I finish what I need to get done today, this seems a not unreasonable reward. And having looked up the prices of salons in nearby neighborhoods, the shirt's about a third of the price it would cost to get an inch trimmed off the ends.

Fame, shame, notoriety

This afternoon, I was sitting on a bench on Houston Street when I suddenly noticed I was being photographed by what looked (by the camera and general appearance) to be a professional photographer. This was either because my chambray shirt, Target wayfarers, white jeans, and silver clogs (and, uh, tote bags) combo was awesome, or it was for a spread on poorly-executed trends, disheveled grad students, or something else of the fashion-don'ts persuasion. The fact that the man simply took the pictures and continued on his way suggests the latter possibility.

Weekend recap

-Old age hit with a vengeance when I realized that going out Thursday and Friday nights was simply too much for me to handle. Of course, the Saturday exhaustion owed something to my decision on Friday that the best procrastination was not, say, 15 minutes reading fashion blogs, but an 8-mile run. Not sure what I was thinking there.

-In mourning for Bouley croissants, Jo and I went to the Union Square-area Joe, which is no Bouley, but which did have one of those giant Doughnut Plant cinnamon buns, which almost made up for it. Speaking of which, does anyone understand the meaning of the following sentence in the "Gone" sign (see below) at Bouley Bakery? "We enjoyed our relationship and learned more about you as a customer." Does this not come across as though Bouley got to know its customers and decided we kind of suck, and thus are not worthy of their pastry? I defer to the experts in coffee-shop signage, ahem, for help:



It's a nice touch that they think croissant-patrons are interested in the $36 prix-fixe. Jo and I have, I'm not kidding, discussed going to Bouley-the-restaurant, which apparently still exists, with our full loyalty stamp-card from the now-defunct Bakery, and requesting the coffee that is our due.

-Saturday post-Joe was the dachshund festival in Washington Square Park. Some highlights:


A dachshund in a bag!


The elusive blond(e) dachshund.


A non-dachshund intruder provokes curiosity.


This dachshund seriously thought it was a person.

-Just got back from seeing The Misfortunates: Think L'Enfant, but Flemings rather than Walloons. The camera angles were very "Rachel Getting Married"-like, which is to say, nausea-inducing. (Oddly enough, it wasn't the scenes with vomit that did it.) While it was a fine movie, it has the potential to incite anti-Flemitism.

Spring cleaning, the messy-grad-student edition

-Fix master list of all dissertation-related sources, primary and secondary, I ever have used or plan to use. This is the sort of thing I should have had all along, but it's now spread over a few different word docs, not to mention in need of some general updating. It all needs to be in one place! And it all is now. Almost.

-Look under pile of newspapers on 'dining room' table for books. Sort according to library or owned. Shelve accordingly.

-Swiffer extravaganza.

Goals for the day, some fully met, some not

-Improve upon application essay that must, among other things, distill 30-page prospectus into three pages.

-Run six miles with a freeze-prone iPod. (The serenity some feel on headphone-free runs is not something I experience. Either I think about the distance left, or I think about my work - see above - without the writing implements necessary to do anything about it.)

-Bake "shtetl apple cake," or cake from a recipe that's been passed down from Old Country times. (What I now see in the oven looks more like shtetl apple crumble, but that works too, and might work even better with the vanilla ice cream that will go with.)

-Not consume entire shtetl apple dessert before Jo gets back from his trip tonight. (This is made more challenging by item #2 and the ensuing tripled appetite, and can only be offset by preempting this impulse with something called 'dinner.' But the cake smells so good! Who could have pasta with that readily available?)

Astronomie and other feminine pursuits

-Fashion! Consider this the unofficial announcement of my (theoretical) clothing line, Astronomie, inspired by the presence but relative lack of galaxy-patterned clothes on the market today. If there can be Anthropologie, there can most definitely be Astronomie, and the name would at least make sense. Now I just have to figure out how one goes about getting fabric made with photographs of, well, with photographs (I know it can be done, but have no experience with this sort of thing), and, once that's done, learning how to make clothes.

-Cooking! It could be that this and this are as good as the same recipe, which I find suspicious, but whatever it is, it looks good. I'm going to attempt a variant of this with wheatberries, cubed yam, red onion, and arugula. I'm also going to attempt to recreate a garlicky cannellini bean appetizer I had in DC, but with parsley in the place of arugula, because it just seems like it would taste better. (The arugula having not tasted like anything in this dish.) Clearly I had a little too much fun in the bulk-foods section of Fairway. What either of these might add up to in terms of meals remains to be seen, which leads me to the unfortunately realization that the main course remains to be bought. Once the semester starts, it'll be back to arrabiata...

-Grocery shopping! Of those who read it, what did you take from the New Yorker story on the guy who started Whole Foods? What I got, in part, was that Whole Foods is - gasp - an enterprise aimed at making a profit. There are, it seems, naive shoppers who imagine that the green aura of the chain means that it exists out of the selfless purpose of making you, the consumer, lead a healthy and sustainable life.

The most interesting aspect of the piece was, I felt, the reminder of how Whole Foods at once revolutionized and destroyed what was once called the health-food store, the dusty, vitamin-smelling shop aimed at aging hippies with ponytails. If someone had told me as a kid that as an adult, my main supermarket would be a glorified health-food store... My sense is that many shop at Whole Foods not because of its self-promotion-as-virtuous, but despite it. If there were another nearby source of high-quality produce, cheap pasta and bulk goods, etc., one that didn't include a section with 'natural' cosmetics and organic t-shirts or whatever it is that's sold in the middle of the stores, I'd be all for it. But the no-frills, less expensive Fairway means a subway ride beyond what I could commit to during the semester, and the even less frilly but very convenient Gristedes has all the trappings of a regular ol' nothin' fancy supermarket, yet charges a ton for absolutely everything. Whole Foods, you've won this one.

-Laundry! Better get to that...

"[...] plying her with Champagne and cigarettes and airy, high-minded talk."

I suppose this is where movies require suspension of disbelief, by I find it tough to see how Peter Sarsgaard-not-heavily-disguised would have to "ply" a heterosexual female with anything more than his being a clean-shaven Peter Sarsgaard. A full-bearded Sarsgaard might have to ply, but this one? I won't have it.