Woman Over 35

There are certain birthdays that matter. The last of these for me was 27, aka the age I became a madame, in a couple (but not all) senses of the word. 18 and 21 blend together, as both involved wandering around the East Village with friends. 30 made no great impression - as I recall, it was one of those Princeton summers when no one was around, and I marked the day itself by driving to H-Mart in Edison and buying, among other groceries, a whole fish.

But 35! That's the one, isn't it? Women under 35 in one category, those over that age in another. In a matter of days, I will be a Woman Over 35. A not-young-anymore woman. Which would probably feel a whole lot more momentous if I'd spent 27-34 under the illusion that I was, during those years, young. But for so many reasons, not so much? I was never under the illusion that everyone thought I was ten years younger than was actually the case (for every flattering carding, three 'ma'ams'; who was I kidding?), nor, I suppose, that 30 was supposed to look ancient so how odd that I at 30 did not. (30 looks ancient to children, but not to fellow adults of any age.) Still, the famous signs of aging start... at birth, really, so while I'm sure new ones will pop up that alarm me at various points, it would be absurd to think you could reach 35 without having yet encountered any. 

Also: 35 is already well into the age range where one is only a young woman according to people (men) who are themselves so far from young that maybe you're not young, either. And by that standard, every age at least a decade under that of the typical male lifespan is young, if you want it to be. (A 50-year-old is a mere slip of a youth where 70-year-old dudes are concerned.)

Also, also: Most of the "35" scaremongering is directed at women in life situations other than my own. Whether 35 is too old to get a man (yeah, no, and no, not all women even want one in the first place!) isn't my immediate concern, given I've been with my now-husband since 23. I'm more aware of that other issue pertaining to 35-ness, but (see posts below) one can rest assured it is not in this very moment occurring to me that female fertility declines with age. In any case, the woman who reaches 35 shocked that the likes of her could possibly age past 20, in a way that impacts her body or is perceptible to those around her, is either a myth or a rarity. The whole women age thing (presented, inevitably, as though people who aren't women don't) is sort of the gist of much media aimed at women, so it's unclear how any of us would reach even 20 oblivious to it.

And yet: 35 feels like a thud. Despite feeling ancient since forever, I've doubtless been benefitting (or suffering??) from youth in ways I haven't been aware of. Like, maybe I thought I knew, but give it a few days and I'll realize I didn't have a clue.

The French Girl vs. The Frenchwoman

Despite thinking the whole thing is silly - and despite knowing, about as much as any American could, that the whole thing is nonsense - I've never quite been able to avoid falling for the whole Frenchwoman thing. I get - and have long since gotten - that the entire thing is based on a myth. It's subtly racist, classist, and more. It essentializes French women, who are real people, not objects for Anglo tourists to gawk at as fashion references. I know - believe me, I know! it's what my degree is in! - that there's more to France than ballet-flat shopping.

And yet.

The women in the posh parts of Paris do have great style. Yes, this is circular - "great style" is defined, in much of the world, as looking like a rich Parisian woman. But I was reminded of this last year, when I was back in Paris for the first time in several years. Gosh but did these women look fantastic. How boring of me to think this, but there it was.

I left feeling inspired to dress like the women I saw there... all the while realizing that this would have to involve clothes purchased elsewhere (because my Canadian dollars add up to 1/16th of a consignment blazer), and that once assembled by me, once on me, nothing particularly Parisian would result. It's not as if taking inspiration from French classmates and professors during grad school (one, in particular, of each, now that I think of it) left me looking Parisian. But was that ever the point?

My thinking is, the appeal of looking like a French woman is really two different things, depending on your age. When I was younger, it was about the gamine look. Not that I ever looked all that gamine - I was, and am, the wrong build for "gamine" - but the idea was to look understated, elegant, not trying too hard. It was a way to look nice but not sexy, which, day-to-day, especially when you're in your early 20s, has its practical advantages. "Gamine" is also a way of tricking yourself getting excited enough about dressing in work attire that shopping for that sort of clothing doesn't seem like a chore, or like a reminder that you're no longer a young person. (Without the myth, without the belief that you're somehow channeling a New Wave actress, you're just a grad student buying used J. Crew ankle-length slacks.)

As I got closer to 30, Frenchwoman style started to be something else: the promise of getting older but not, I suppose, giving up. To me, at almost-34, it seems like a way to look good that doesn't involve trying to look younger. Which is immensely appealing because looking younger is not a thing that's going to happen. Not for any of us. While French women hold no secret where DGAF-ness about aging is concerned (witness the skincare industry of that country), there does seem to be a thing where women of all ages look glamorous. It's an aspiration, even if the reality is, I'm an American with the collection of sweats (school-name-bearing and generic) to prove it.

This is what I think is happening: Younger women and even teen girls in that bit of Paris dress what would seem in the US (and, as I understand it, the UK) to be sort of middle-aged, but the look works for them. Older women dress... exactly the same as younger women, and it works for them, too, at least as well. There isn't, in those neighborhoods, much of a youth culture, at least where clothes are concerned, but nor is there an assumption that The Elegant Uniform is for daughters, not mothers or grandmothers.

My own vision for Older Frenchwoman Chic, for the look I aspire to/to age into/to wear if I can sustain Effort for long enough, is a bit different from the gamine uniform. Fewer Breton-striped shirts. More... black boots? Skirts rather than cutoffs? How far this project goes beyond my imagination, we shall see.

Open thread

Into The Gloss has an "open thread" about aging. As I type - and this is probably for the best, because I'd have trouble not responding to those - there aren't any comments yet.

When I learned of this thread-prompt, via their Twitter, I immediately knew the direction it would go in. Devil-may-care! Like, we all look forward to aging! Wrinkles add character!! From a site that specializes in (very seductively, and with gorgeous photos) explaining why you need to slather your face (and body) in stuff that goes for $100 an ounce at a French pharmacy. And why is that exactly, if not to stave off aging? Self-care, maybe, but isn't that more the thing where, as your big weekend outing, you go to the really nice coffee shop where the matcha lattes are $6 but worth it? No, it means slathering, and just as the unstated purpose of all fashionable dietary alterations is be thinner, so, too, is skincare a great big euphemism for look younger.

But sure enough, the open thread is introduced with a quote from a well-known fashion professional (middle-aged at most), announcing that she "'approach[es] aging with ice cream and a martini.'" Which is not the way any human being has ever approached anything ever, but which sounds relaxing.

There's also a well-lit photo of Jane Birkin and two of her daughters (whose names I'll pretend not to know, but please, I could name at least three Kardashians...), because... Birkin is by definition older than these two women, even though the three of them could pass for 15? More on that photo: The three are sitting in some sort of red-velvet-lined nightclub. There are cigarettes and a lighter on the table - as well there would be, in this martini-and-ice-cream fantasy. The only difference between Jane and her daughters is that whereas one daughter is carrying a very casual-let's-say tote bag, Jane has on her lap what appears to be a Birkin bag. That is, the Hermès one named after her.

How does anyone feel about aging? Some mix of grateful to not be dead, and annoyed at the closing-off of possibilities. For women: Some mix of relieved that the flow of unsolicited male attention has slowed down (from wherever it once was, which of course varies tremendously) and disappointed that the power that comes from being A 20-Something Woman (or 30-something, maybe...) has vanished. For everyone: Maybe you will write that novel, but no one will be in awe of you for doing so. No one will remark at how clever you are for having depicted the stresses of the adult world almost as though you'd actually experienced them.

Life in the age of the micro-era

After a whole lot of working from home (dissertating, Dish-ing, freelancing, etc.), I'm once again working from a mix of home and not-home (teaching French and book-writing in English, and also freelancing, and also, in principle, sleeping). This means I need to be, like, dressed. Not merely in clothing, but in clothing that's a notch or several above what's needed to walk a dog in the woods, with a 5% chance of running into another human being, and a 0% chance of running into one who'd expect me to be dressed professionally, fashionably, or anything along those lines.

This seems so simple, so obvious, and just so doable - I'm well out of college! I have a degree in French! I live in a city with lots of stores! - but is kind of daunting. Part of this is that I hadn't realized quite how dire the situation had become. My 'good' clothes turned out to be very washed-out Breton-striped shirts from several years ago. So a lot needs to be replaced, or just sort of purchased to begin with, but there isn't really any conceivable time to do this in. And I'm not even factoring in the other shopping expedition: Canada-ready winter-wear. My inner stereotypical heterosexual man experiences this with a sense of impending doom. But there's also a part of me that's a stereotypical... my own demographic, let's say, and that was totally all, "There's Intermix/COS/Muji in Toronto?!" I can kind of see getting excited about this.

The more complicated question is what to buy. Again, sounds simple! But I have no idea. It's sort of... been a while? And when I last properly shopped, I was a) younger, and b) living in another era. The era when bangs/fringe, kale, and farm-to-table, and more on this in a moment... were in. While it sounds so pathetic to be like, 'I want to wear what's in!', this is a genuine practical concern if you're dressing like a 2008-era grad student. If you have a sort of implicit sense of this, you can focus on cut and fit and all of this while sneering at those who bother with trends. If you don't - if, that is, you've spent the past four-plus years split between avant-garde or super-now fashion-blog reading and disintegrating skinny-jeans-wearing - this takes a bit more effort. Or maybe it just takes going to Zara and buying whatever more or less fits.

But this isn't so much a fashion post as an era one. I've been thinking recently - and this mainly has implications for how I present various things in the book I'm writing - that times have changed. Since 2008-ish, or even 2011-ish. Trends seem different - noticeably so. Cultural trends, not just clothing. Young People Today, perhaps they're different as well. Still working on putting my finger on what these differences are (and, book-wise, on precisely how this shift has both exaggerated and diminished various "privilege" concerns), but for the time being, this is my point in full: Times have changed.

GAF, revisited

There's an article I've read variants of over the years, and that's currently circulating in Styles article and Jezebel post form. It's the Silver Linings of Aging piece; the specific age anchoring it can vary, but if it's anything much under 30, people will just laugh.

The point will inevitably be that getting older means caring less. It will come from a place of, everything's kind of sorted in life. The 'I'm old and haggard now' will be part self-deprecation, part genuine anxiety, and part humble-brag about having ticked whichever list of personal and professional achievements. Much of Tracy Moore's list on Jezebel amounts to, she's too old to have no money. Which is a great sentiment, if one that relies on upward mobility, or on aging meaning higher earning. The proverbial basement-dwelling millennial will also reach 30, if he hasn't already.

Other aspects, though, are not financial, but follow the same general pattern. For example: Being "too old" for parties and bars and casual friends one doesn't even like is a great big euphemism for having already found a partner. Plenty of people "too old" to be at the bars are there all the same, for the same reason younger adults are, and some who now think they're "too old" will, at 45, post-divorce, wind up back at them, and it won't be because they've gotten any younger.

On the one hand, yes, people do, on average, sort their lives out as they get older. On the other hand, life isn't just this smooth upwards progression of self-improvement. The physical-decline bit is unavoidable, but there's no guarantee of a corresponding raise for each wrinkle.

A too-old-to-care that addresses this, though, I'm OK with. And Dominique Browning's NYT one does:

The key to life is resilience, and I’m old enough to make such a bald statement. We will always be knocked down. It’s the getting up that counts. By the time you reach upper middle age, you have started over, and over again.

This could well be why, like memoir, the too-old-for-this genre works better coming from someone a bit older.

But my initial reason for this post, which I seem to have lost track of, relates to the whole issue of "caring." In an ideal, rational world, getting older would mean caring less about nonsense. And on the whole, it does. But not in the neat, done-with-that-silliness way these articles suggest. The stupid, neurotic sort of caring - the unproductive, time-suck kind of GAF - may wane, only to (what's the non-clichéd version of 'rear its ugly head'?) return unexpectedly. You can go for years without much worrying what you look like, or whether you've been included in some social gathering, and think everything's going great professionally, and then for whatever reason, something internal or external brings those feelings back. Anyone who's been an adult, or who has witnessed adults while "off" (that is, at home) is going to be aware of this phenomenon. OK, not anyone. But enough people that it seems somehow off - or maybe just aspirational? - to declare non-caring an inherent perk of getting older.

A "bookish" roundup

I was frequenting this brunch place in town, not because I like brunch, but because that bread. It's this odd mix of fluffy and wholesome, with all the grains and such I like, and none of the ones I just sort of tolerate. I figured it came either from the place or, more likely, from some special Central European bakery, perhaps a wholesaler, I'd have no access to. And... today I discovered said bread at Wegmans. $5 a (huge) loaf, or $3 for half, but still a better deal than the $13 (now $15) for the brunch. There are also soft pretzels that look... familiar, but those I haven't tasted to confirm. 

It's quite possible (I have my reasons to suspect) that everything the place sells comes from Wegmans, which is on the one hand disillusioning, but on the other... I mean, eating out always means a markup. They probably don't want customers to know their stuff comes from the supermarket, but they, I don't know, curate it? I'd have never found this bread otherwise, and it's amazing. ("Seven Grain Bread," for those in Wegmans territory.) And it's on the whole a good thing for me personally that I can recreate the meal I so enjoy. But this may well spell the end of a briefly-revived stint as someone who does brunch.

***

So I was trying to cross the street just now with my husband and our dog, and we were at a crosswalk without traffic lights. It wasn't particularly dark out yet. There was a car coming, but quite far, and on a 25mph road, so I stepped into the road - I think we all did? - and made the 'we're crossing' gesture. The car slowed down in a way that indicated the driver saw us, then sped up, only to more abruptly stop once we were definitively in the crosswalk. As the driver passed, he shouted a sarcastic, "You're welcome!" from his SUV, as if he'd done us the biggest favor in the world, allowing us to cross where you're supposed to, the way you're supposed to. And... I know I'm newish at driving culture, but is this a thing? You're supposed to thank cars that allow you to cross in a residential area, in a crosswalk?  

When I'm driving, I stop for pedestrians (without making a thing of it! they have the right of way!) and sometimes get a gesture of appreciation, but by no means usually, and I by no means expect one. I suppose maybe it's weird when a pedestrian thanks the driver who stopped first, but not the one on the opposite side of the road, but I've had this happen exactly once, and lost exactly no sleep over it. So, to be clear, this guy was in the wrong, correct?

***

A guy I think I went to college with (name sounds familiar, don't know if I'd ever met him, had no preexisting opinion of him, but it's a huge school) wrote this week's Modern Love. It reminded me of a novel I read not that long ago, so much so that I kept wanting to congratulate the female author on creating such a convincing heterosexual male protagonist. 

Anyway, what interests me is this:

I was amazed to have gotten this far. As my friends were sick of hearing, it made no sense to me that a gorgeous woman in her early 20s who spoke four languages and had lived on three continents was spending her Saturdays with me, a 31-year-old bookish type from Pittsburgh.

 And:

“How old are you?” one asked, which put our substantial age difference — something we had not yet talked about — suddenly under a spotlight.

(You can tell this is someone from UChicago because of the "bookish type" self-description.)

Anyway, a pairing of "31" and "early 20s" doesn't seem all that outrageous, although there's often a life-stage difference between 20 and 24, one far greater than between 24 and 31. I would say something about how you never see 31-year-old women with several-years-younger men, until I remembered several couples I'm friends with who fit that pattern.

What struck me, then, was how much of a thing it is, for a 31-year-old man, to be dating a younger-but-not-indecently-so woman. This isn't just, for him, a thing that happens once you're an adult, and are socializing with people who weren't necessarily in kindergarten the same year you were. It's part of her value. It's not enough that she's beautiful - she's a catch because of her not-31-ness. And yes, this absolutely did strike me because I, too, am 31. I'm surprised-but-not-really that even men as young as 31 would find same-age women excessively ancient. That a woman of legal age could be, in some meaningful sense, a younger woman to someone 31.

So I've watched some "Millionaire Matchmaker" in my day (and so I nominate myself for the alumni award for Least Bookish Type, literature PhD notwithstanding), and there, the men of course want younger women, but this will be for one of two (stated) reasons. One is that it hits them at a haggard 57-ish that they'd like kids. The other is that they just prefer women under 25, 30, 19, whatever, which is the trickier issue. These same men will also claim they want to settle down. (Yes, I understand that it's probably semi-scripted and actually an interwoven series of ads for cupcake and flower companies.) One put it... best?... when he said his perfect woman would be 29 and three quarters forever. The late-middle-aged man in question looked like a cross between Eric Cartman and Donald Trump.

It seems, in other words, a gamble to be appreciated for your youth. For your beauty... well, beauty may fade, but is more subjective. A man might cease to find a woman beautiful without her having changed in appearance, or might continue to be attracted to her because he still sees her as she looked when they met. But a man who settles down with a woman because she's such a great distance from the age at which he thinks women cease to be interesting... I mean, she will, barring unforeseen disaster, turn that age.

Fauxbivalence revisited

Yes, I've seen the latest in fauxbivalence. My cohort is leaving the age of wedding fauxbivalence, and moving on to the early-middle-aged question of fauxbivalence within marriage. Or: Nona Willis Aronowitz remains fauxbivalent. Whatever the case, old age.

If this piece irritated me less than her wedding fauxbivalence one, it was partly because it totally does give people a different impression of you if you mention a spouse. It makes you seem like someone who'd prefer to stay home watching Netflix than going out, which (may be true but) is - and this I can attest - a slight impediment to making new friends, at least for a time, if you marry earlier than your peers. It's temporary, of course, but it's a thing. So if she was just saying that saying "husband" makes you seem old and conservative, well, it does. First-world-problems, but problems all the same.

Mostly, though, it was because at least with this piece, there was some concrete reason why Aronowitz wouldn't want to be thought "married." With the wedding, it seemed to be about aesthetics; here, there's a buried lede: "we are allowed to hook up with other people when one of us is out of town." Oh! That really is a different sort of "married" than is generally assumed. For all the talk of "monogamish," a ring or a reference to a spouse typically signals that someone is not available, so if you are, how on earth would you convey that? If, then, she'd left it at, it's awkward to say you're married when you're in an open marriage, fair enough. I bet it is!

But no! She doesn't leave it at that. She takes it in an appropriative direction, talking about "code-switching" and "respectability politics," as if her struggles as an open-married, by-all-accounts-straight white woman "philosophically opposed to what traditional marriage means" have something to do with those of African-Americans. And gay people - her plight is also like theirs. Or something. And then it came back to me why fauxbivalence bothered me in the first place: It's the conflation of one's own quirkiness (or quirks of the progressive subculture one was born into) with marginalization.

Dressing for one's fourth decade

Guest-blogging at the Dish was fun. If you're so inclined, check out my posts there, which cover the usual WWPD gamut - European anti-Semitism, shiny things, "privilege," and so on.

On a different note, clothes-shopping. Sort of. Let me start over:

I find it incredibly relaxing to look at clothes. Online or in person. I understand that there's a whole web of privilege-critique to apply to this - if I were black and thus preemptively accused of shoplifting, I might not enjoy poking around stores so much; so, too, if I didn't fit into straight-sized clothes, although that bit matters somewhat less, because I don't often actually try on any clothes. As someone whose career has been in the academia-and-writing realm, I've never had a tremendous shopping budget. If anything, I think the fact that I can't have all-the-clothes makes looking at them somewhat more interesting, but not so much so that I'd look around in a place where I truly could never, ever afford anything. (That, and little boutiques where it's just you, the salesperson, and the unaffordable clothes are not for me.) It's not that I never buy clothes - the Uniqlo receipts floating around various surfaces in my apartment suggest I do this sometimes. It's just that the looking-to-buying ratio is somewhat skewed. And I spend far too much time on the COS website for someone who's never going to buy these $100 Scandinavian minimalist dresses that would look reasonable - if on anybody - on a six-foot, broad-shouldered Scandinavian woman.

Offline clothes-browsing is not an activity easily indulged where I live. Less so, still, on a Sunday evening. But Urban Outfitters was open, so I figured, why not?

And it was a sea of... familiarity. All plaid flannel skirts and crushed velvet. Pre-ripped all-cotton jeans (the skinnies are on clearance; so last season). And then it hit me: I remembered when this was first in fashion. What an old-person thought, but there it was. What Tavi had been precociously nostalgic for a few years ago is now mainstream-hip. I guess that makes sense. (Self-promotional aside: NYMag linked to something I wrote about Tavi! Not quite the same as founding a magazine while still in utero, but it'll do.) Anyway, it occurred to me that if I can vividly remember crushed velvet dresses and Angela Chase-chic from the first time around, none of it would benefit my wardrobe.

That said. I know I should be thinking: 30s! Like those spreads in fashion mags, where they tell you how to dress for each decade, which seems so ageist when you're in your teens or 20s, but which, once you've seen yourself in clothes from 15 at twice that age, start to make sense. (There's an amazing bit about that, but as it relates to discussions of cosmetic surgery, in Roz Chast's new book.) As much as I might like the holographic oxfords I spotted on a recent looking-but-not-buying trip to a local mall, they'd do nothing for me. But what is 30s dressing, if not office attire for a corporate life I don't lead?

All that said: what do we think of these jeans, in Ultrafaded? So-very-now? Or yet another gesture in the wrong sartorial direction?

What's an Instagram?

So I have joined Instagram, inspired in part by Kei, and in part by desire to get in on Japanese toy poodle Instagram. If I have my way, Bisou will soon be a huge Japanese celebrity. This is unlikely, because a) brushing her every other day and getting her groomed every month and a half doesn't add up to her looking like the glamorous Japanese poodles Into The Gloss profiled, and b) she doesn't have the wardrobe. There were absolutely stores in Tokyo that sold amazing small-dog outfits (including kimonos), but Bisou wasn't there with us, so we didn't know her size, plus I don't think these outfits would fit with her lifestyle, which principally involves trying to eat deer poop when I'm not looking and chasing squirrels up trees. (Not, thankfully, in that order.) Of course, I'm sure the poodles of Nara present similar challenges...

But I can't figure out anything about Instagram. How does one search it for people, images, anything? Also: What is Instagram etiquette? People are adding me and, on the wild off-chance that I ever figure out the mechanics of adding people back, whom is one 'friends' with on this site? Part of what inspired me to join was that I felt like it was a way to avoid spamming Facebook with every last photo of my amateur Cooking With Dog existence. I can't imagine most of these people would want to see any of this. I don't flatter myself that anyone's losing sleep over whether I follow them on Instagram or whether I restrict my follows almost exclusively to people who pose large groups of lap dogs in fields in Japan. For all I know, these are automatic adds that happen when someone one is Facebook-friends with joins the site. But the situation I don't want to get into is feeling like I'm spamming people on Instagram by posting... the very sort of items I got on the site in order to post.

Not a thing to wear

This morning I did what had to be done and dropped maybe half the contents of my closet off at the closest thrift shop. There are two consignment boutiques closer by (one too intimidatingly pretentious for me to have ever been inside), but if there was ever a moment to even attempt consignment with these items, it was over five years ago at least. Most of what was in there seemed late-college-era at the newest, with a little bit from the interviews-and-job I had between college and grad school. Including one truly hideous pinstriped flared pantsuit (!) from Express, a tag still on the jacket, indicating not that I hadn't worn it, nor even that I was sneakily planning to wear then return it (it wasn't even a price tag, just something identifying the item), but rather that my attention to detail in that area in 2006 was somewhat lacking. Needless to say, there was stitching still left where it shouldn't have been in the suit I wore for a kind of important interview in 2005. Oh well.

The hope with this organization-fest was that I'd discover all the great stuff I already owned and not need to shop. That I would, as the cringe-inducing saying goes, 'shop my closet.' With the exception of one Uniqlo mini-ish skirt of recent-ish vintage, that did not happen. The reality is, the wearable, reasonably-well-fitting clothing I own is precisely the stuff I already wear. The other stuff was all sort of terrible, but for so many different reasons. Much of it had to do with details - button size, flared-ness of sleeves and pant legs - that make clothing look dated after a decade. But there were also all the items that never quite fit but were a nice color or print or something, which is maybe easier to get away with at 19 than 30. And then, of course, was the stuff that was just stained or worn out. But the main takeaway was that it took me ages to develop a sense (chaotic as it may be) of personal style. Whatever was in evidence in the items bought prior to, say, 25, it wasn't that.

In search of fries and mouse

-Mick Jagger's new lady is younger than I am. Eep.

-Shake Shack got rid of the crinkle-cut pre-frozen fries that were the reason I went to Shake Shack for my occasional fast-food needs, and replaced them with something vile that looks like high-end-restaurant fries but tastes like cold raw potatoes, or did today in Philadelphia. Why???

-For future reference: if you have a practical question about something really mundane, even if you happen to be a heterosexual woman sitting with your husband, even if your celebrity crushes are all dark-haired men from the 1990s who aren't what they once were but then again who is, don't go up to a modelesque blond woman in a coffee shop. I saw this woman using a wireless mouse with her laptop, and as I happen to be in the market for just that item (I haven't been able to click on anything properly for weeks), I thought I'd ask her where she got hers, seeing as she was using it with a computer similar to my own, and the search I'd done thus far led me to mice (?) too close in price to a new computer. But her response was a kind of like, why is someone talking to me in a coffee shop again, which, upon seeing what she looked like (I'd noticed her mouse!), I don't find hard to believe. Even the not-so-modelesque have this experience in coffee shops - I can only imagine. So what I learned was that she got her mouse "online." The search continues.

Delayed grad-ification

If you defend your dissertation in September, you have two choices: graduate with the others of your calendar year the previous spring, or with those of the next one the following year. Because I was convinced I'd fail my defense (not something I had any reason to fear, if for no other reason than because no one ever fails this), I didn't partake in any of the festivities last spring. So I "graduated" yesterday, which was the soonest I could do so after my defense. 

I felt weird being congratulated for something I did months ago, but then I remembered that the dissertation's only part of the process. That, and when I got there, I learned that, for various reasons, some classmates who defended as far back as spring 2013 would also be marching. I soon realized that one was interested in my impostor-syndrome-ish 'but this isn't really my graduation' disclaimer, nor in the fact that my diploma's been in my apartment for ages. This was graduation, because it was collective. You need to be with the people you went through the experience with, even if it's an experience that ends with a few years writing a project on your own, quite possibly far from the university itself. 

Grad-school graduation was, it turned out, a really big reunion of French-studying sorts from many cohorts. The short version of why: my program used to take 10-plus years, but now, due to various reforms in the department and the university, takes 6; I fell somewhere in the middle. This was the year when everyone sort of converged. It was lively and fun, although chances are I wouldn't have said so at the time. I mean, the pre-ceremony reception was fabulous - again, there were so many of us! - but the ceremony itself involved copious sweating under the robes while all thousand (?) MA students got their degrees, one by one, only to skip out on the thing (evidently; I was too overheated by then to make the necessarily movement to see this) when it was time for the far smaller group of PhDs to go to the stage. Given the relative... schlep of these degrees, this didn't seem right, but the word on the cynical street was that because they pay for their programs, they get priority. (At least they let all of us use the gym!)

The main takeaway, though, was that I remember a time when PhD graduates seemed ancient, and yet, looking around, every traditional-age PhD looked... young. While they are - see above - slightly younger than they once were, at least in the humanities, at least at NYU, this is very much a case of age being relative. We are old. These are people I was at of-legal-drinking-age-and-then-some parties with seven years ago.

Smile for #tbt

I have never thrown back on a Thursday before, but here goes: In honor of "smile" catcalling finally getting its due, my 2005 post on the phenomenon.

Back when I was still young and urban enough to have these experiences on a regular basis, there wasn't any particular movement or vocabulary fighting it. No phrase "bitchy resting face" to describe the withering glance some give to others in the coffee shop/library/subway whether or not they're trying to. No widespread acknowledgment that calls to smile are insulting. This was the one I was always getting, and it always made me feel kind of guilty - like maybe I should smile more! Maybe I should greet total strangers with a grin and wish them a good day just for the heck of it!

Because self-awareness is imperfect at best, I saw non-smiling-ness as more about being a cynical New Yorker (or whatever the opposite is of "cornfed") and only eventually (around when I wrote that post, I suppose) began to connect it to being young, female, and someone creepy men wanted smiling at them. It makes me smile to see that today's recipients of this are responding in an organized manner.

New extremes in #normcore

I'm more fascinated than I should be by "normcore," which seems to explain so much. But I thought of it most recently when I saw that another of my excessive fascinations, Into The Gloss, had a spread on... wedding bands for the unmarried. Not in the traditional sense of, a woman will wear one to avoid getting hit on, or a man will do so to project a certain married-man allure. (This is apparently a thing, or so George Costanza believed.) No, because wedding bands are attractive, like, as jewelry. This is demonstrated - how else? - with the use of a naked (but mostly SFW) model smoking a cigarette, and then some other women whose glamor is demonstrated in various ways, but who are there to encourage you to go out and get a wedding band for yourself. Because ITG is ever so persuasive, you may well do just that.

The cynic in me says, ITG is sponsored by one of the jewelry brands mentioned (see the tremendous banner ads for said brand), and they had to come up with something. But why wedding-band chic? Why does that convince, if not because it's the ultimate in conventional jewelry? It seems to fit with the old-lady-chic vibe, in the sense that it's the sort of thing that's cute when someone early-20s or younger does it, or, perhaps a better way to say this is, is a way to highlight that one is so young that, haha, one couldn't be married, one is simply so young and rich and fabulous that one will spend a usual wedding-ring amount on a wedding ring, to wear as a random accessory. I have trouble imagining a woman of a more madame age doing this.

The late-1990s Livejournal I never had

The great thing about getting older, all those it's-great-to-get-older protest-too-much articles always claim, is that you reach a certain age and no longer care how others see you. In my experience, this is largely true, if more for those of us for whom ancientness correlates with romantic settled-down-ness. (If you're single and dating, you're bound to care a bit more how attractive people you have yet to meet will find you.) I can remember, in early adolescence, having thoughts about, say, how my thighs looked when I was sitting vs. standing. I no longer ponder my appearance in this micro way, nor even in an especially macro one. I use a mirror when necessary, i.e. to not put eyeliner on random parts of my face, but I don't gaze into it in search of any more holistic information.

It's possible to go along feeling like one's vanity is done, only to have it return, if momentarily, just to remind you that it can. That you're not above such concerns after all. I was feeling maybe a tiny bit old attending a friend's 27th birthday party, but the real issue was that the bar it was at was otherwise populated by people who hovered around the legal drinking age. It was also karaoke night, and the songs it occurred to me to request were popular... before the millennium. I was drinking beer from a pitcher, out of a plastic cup, which somehow made it that much more salient that I'm no longer 21. We were all old. Not quite the-old-people-at-the-bar old (there were some definitively elderly people filling that role), but still.

That, and the book I'd suggested for the book club I'd suggested, "Lucky Jim," has a great many... comparative descriptions of two women, one (Christine) effortlessly gorgeous, the other (Margaret) always somewhat off. Jim at one point wishes Margaret were just a bit prettier. He dreads seeing her in one particular unflattering outfit. She's not horrible-looking, but sort of borderline - with the right sort of effort, or if she just happens to be dressed and made-up in a way that pleases Jim, she's attractive, but she's incapable of inspiring the sort of nervous, must-run-in-opposite-direction response that Christine summons just by existing.

While reading, I did think how probably all women have been in both roles to different people, on different occasions. Or the sensible part of me thought this. The less-sensible one thought, oh my God, I'm Margaret. (A follow-up title for Judy Blume?) Every time I dress up, it probably looks like a costume. There's probably lipstick on my teeth - or I should be better about checking this on the rare occasions I wear dark lipstick. I probably have some outfit that's the paisley dress and velvet shoes. Gah!

I suppose what it is is, it's just such a convincing-seeming description of the ways men see women. While a more enlightened approach would be to just identify with the protagonist - after all, women, too, divide men into Christine and Margaret categories, which is just as unfair, if not more so given how little control men have over their self-presentation - I both identified with Jim and took the relatively literal approach of identifying with the recipients of the male gaze. That the "male" in question, to whom I imagined possibly coming up short, is a fictional protagonist from 1950s England mattered less than it might have, because this is a very good novel and thus, alas, sort of timeless.

All of which is my longwinded way of explaining why I so appreciated Rachel Hills's positive spin on a certain French aristocratic model's previously-mentioned high self-esteem. Specifically, Rachel suggests we adapt said model's self-description as a template, putting in our own physical traits: "See, I’ve had this great chance in life of being born with good genes. I was born ________, with a pretty face (not to everyone’s taste, I concede), and ________." Rachel fills out one of her own, and I see that I'd be capable of doing so as well. After all, weren't we all born with a pretty face that not everyone finds pretty? And we can probably all come up with two more traits such that to mention them would be to boast.

Not-so-sweet 16

Ah, Facebook. A high school friend was tagged in a scanned copy of our school literary magazine's yearbook photo, which alerted me to its social-media presence. At first I wasn't sure I was in the group photo, but yesterday several friends and, more definitively, my husband, confirmed. It's from either my sophomore or junior year, making me 15 or 16 at the time. (I presume WWPD has an international audience - a very glamorous one at that - that might need this spelled out.) I can tell it's not my senior year in part because of the presence of students I know graduated before me, but also because I must have looked better than that by 17. At least that's my recollection.

'Hi, I'm on the school literary magazine! Please read my thinly-veiled short stories about unrequited crushes!'

It's hard to explain exactly what was most unimpressive about my appearance at whatever age this was. (I'm estimating 16; 15 was worse, and involved glitter barrettes.) I looked a bit fatter then than I do now, going by this photo, but probably weighed the same - the well-known phenomenon of "baby face." I don't think I still own that exact sweater, but wouldn't rule it out, and in any case still dress like that. I haven't found drastically better things to do with my hair. The eyebrows look a bit 1990s-tadpole, but that's to be expected. None of the clichéd adolescent complaints (acne, braces, bad glasses). 

No, it's the expression. The face that radiates no life experience, and so, so much awkwardness. While I may not look better at 30 than at 23, and while no age thus far has left me looking like a supermodel, there's something nice about knowing that whichever ravages of ancientness have yet to reduce me to looking as I did at 16.

Let this post be a lesson to the pop-evo-psych-PUA contingent, who insist that women peak while still technically girls, and that it's downhill from 16 on. This may be true of the handful who go into runway modeling at that age. Not so the rest of us.

30, something

Finally! A "30" essay (see also: the "40" essay with the gratuitously transphobic or maybe just weird last item) not devoted to the loss of looks that happens instantaneously upon leaving one's 20s. Erika L. Sánchez has "come to terms with the grey hair and the faint appearance of wrinkles," but not with the expectation that 30-year-olds have it together in all life areas:

Thanks to TV and film, I keep foolishly believing that 30-year-old women are supposed to be ultra-successful, live in immaculate homes, and wear expensive high heels. They're supposed to be married, and either have children, or start planning for them. People who are 30 are not supposed to live hand-to-mouth or have panic attacks about their looming student loans. This is not what grownups do.

30-anxieties are real, but more gender-neutral than one might imagine. "30 under 30" lists. Precocious novelists and the stark reality that you will never be one. Or even - as Sánchez points out - the measure of basic settled-ness expected after 30. The 30-is-great counter-message tends to be, sure, you don't look or feel 22 anymore, but at least you own a home and a car and are settled in your career. Even the silver-lining articles can be dispiriting, because chances are, you'll at least not meet some of the milestones. Both because times have changed - that job the dad on "Leave It To Beaver" had probably wasn't waiting for you upon graduation - and for so many personal, individual reasons, like, for example, maybe you spent your 20s getting a not-so-practical advanced degree.

My 30-worries, then, aren't particularly gendered, either. This, despite a whole industry devoted to the idea that 30, in a woman, spells decrepitude. In beauty writing, 30 - even 29 - is the age at which one must start putting money towards the alleged problem. (Note the comment to the Julia Restoin Roitfeld profile: "Wow, she looks great for 30!" The woman looks a well-lit, well-photographed 30, which doesn't look 80.)

Thanks to hair dye and retouching, we don't have much of a sense of what each age looks like, and end up considering all aging premature. Consider Lena Dunham's response to the Photoshop debacle: "I felt like, thank you for removing the one line from my face because I’m 27-years-old and shouldn’t have that there." I could well see not wanting whichever line, but there's nothing outrageous about its making an appearance at 27. Or, conversely, we're told that 30 is so ancient that when what we see in the mirror is quite similar to what we did at 25, we figure we look 25, and 25 looks 20, and really, we could totally walk into a high school unnoticed, except of course we could not.

My sense, from having seen a lot of rich women of all ages, is that nothing has yet been invented that allows you to control the age you project. Most people - men and women, of various degrees of tobacco and sun exposure - look the age they are. Somehow the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While you may think a particular feature is giving you away as not 14 , that's not it at all. There are things one can change to be healthier, or to look better - some of which may be categorized as "anti-aging," some not - but you're not going to look younger. What you accomplish before 30 is kinda-sorta up to you, but you're not responsible for looking 30. It's just inevitable.

So it's not, for me, that I'm somehow above the desire to avoid aging, nor that I, as Sánchez does regarding herself, think I look better at 30 than ever before. I don't think I'd be above pressing a look-10-years-younger button. It's just that I'm convinced no such button exists. So the money I might otherwise spend on "lifting serum" I'd much rather put towards, I don't know, coffee beans so expensive it would almost (but never quite) pay to just get coffee out. Stumptown and Intelligensia readily displace any Clarins or Estée Lauder budget.

The sisterhood of ma'am

At a certain point in my life, I went from miss to ma'am. Because I was living in France at the time, it went by the more charming name of "madame," but the gist was the same. The world started to see me as a woman, not a girl. While I could selectively interpret the world's reaction, focusing on the rare recent instances (OK, instance, singular) of being mistaken for a high school student, it is what it is.

Ever since this transition, I find that I'm approached all the time by women of a certain age. What age? Older than I am, but not elderly. These women tend to be (as much as I can tell) of my own heritage, but not always - yesterday the woman was (as much as I can tell) East Asian. On the street in a city (New York or Philadelphia), in grocery stores. They make all manner of small talk with me, as if we're neighbors in some shtetl of yore.

I know we must allow for all possibilities, but I'm quite certain that these women are not hitting on me. They're not nervously or aggressively approaching me, just letting me know, if I happen to be standing near them, how disappointed they are that the doughnut place has run out of their preferred flavor, but that the flavor that's left is too rich.

And I don't think I'm doing anything to invite their attention. I'm not someone who's generally big on small talk with strangers - some combination of my personality and the training one gets if one begins taking public transportation to school alone at age 10. I don't emit 'friendly' to all, just to this one narrow demographic of middle-aged women, who will just kind of sidle up to me and start chatting. It didn't used to happen, but now that I'm a ma'am, it does.

"Faux wrinkles"

As I've mentioned before, it's immensely appealing - if ultimately futile - to believe that one is young when one is not. Is 30 young? Of course! my readers 30 and over will say. Whereas if you're 22 and the guy who just hit on you is 30, you're not going to weird out your friends if you explain that he's an old dude. Or, if you do go out with him, you can rest assured your friends are talking behind your back about how the dude you're now with is old. And I intentionally use an example involving a 30-year-old man being perceived of as ancient, because as it stands, it's largely assumed that 30-year-old women are decrepit. But no, it cuts both ways. We-the-ancient can, at 30, rest assured that we've still got plenty of time to be the scandalous younger lover of a French politician. It's not so bad to be the youngest rung of old. But we're old.

So! Today, "Into The Gloss" introduced a new beauty concept: "faux wrinkles." A 29-year-old woman profiled (who mentions she "just turned 29" - sigh, aging) notes that she uses a wrinkle-filling cream for her "faux wrinkles," and I'm thinking, if you're attempting to disguise wrinkles, you have wrinkles. Not unusual at all if you're 29 and have very good vision and/or a magnifying mirror. You can also try parting it a bunch of different ways, and maybe you'll find a gray hair or two, and tell yourself that these are faux gray hairs - you're surely going blonde. Or you can try not to look too closely.

But then faux wrinkles are explained: "I don’t have crows feet yet or anything, but if I don’t moisturize properly, concealer will make me look wrinkly." Which, yes, I can concur, under-eye concealer will do this. But it doesn't create wrinkles. It highlights not-as-young-as-you-once-were-ness. How do I know? Because this thing with concealer where you need to use a creamy one or put moisturizer (or, apparently, wrinkle-filling-cream) under it starts at a certain age. I don't remember when, exactly, and it's so gradual that you can easily imagine it had always been the case. Concealer just offers a little preview of sorts.

But whatever. However old you are, there's always a French politician even older.

Maturity

-More Bloggingheads! This time I had the pleasure of chatting with Autumn Whitefield-Madrano about beauty. I compare hemming and hawing over Lululemon at 29 or 30 with doing the same over Adidas Sambas at 9 or 10.

-My current gym-and-laundry-folding accompaniment is "What Not To Wear," although even by my admittedly low standards for this sort of thing, it might be too formulaic. A woman dresses too sloppy/"slutty" (this isn't the Jezebellian, anti-slut-shaming universe, but the tell-it-like-it-is genre of reality TV), and her nearest and dearest summon Stacy and Clinton. She announces that she likes how she dresses, then is somehow magically convinced that her self-presentation indicates low self-esteem and a tendency always to put others first. She has her hair dyed some new color, not always more flattering but better for the dramatic effect, and emerges in an outfit that looks like it's from Ann Taylor even if it's not.

Apart from being repetitive, it's... kind of cringe-inducing, from the initial "ambush" on. There are only the slightest nods to personal taste, and (from the admittedly limited sample I've seen) no acknowledgements of variations in gender self-presentation. (Why can't the more masculine-self-presenting women get spiffied-up in more menswear-inspired clothes? Do they really need lip gloss?)

And I get why they have to do this, given how insulting the premise is ('surprise, everyone in your life hates how you dress, and your hair and makeup aren't so hot either!'), but they go a bit overkill on the body-flattery. They keep announcing that women have an hourglass shape and tiny waist, even when these things are so plainly not the case. I'd have thought most grown women would have long since come to terms with whichever ways we don't resemble swimsuit models, and that being told we have traits we don't would come across as patronizing or just silly. Couldn't they go with a generic and, because it's subjective, not-untrue 'beautiful'?

I was curious to see how others had overanalyzed the show - whether their overanalysis matches up with mine - and, kind of yes and kind of no. In an interesting piece, Greta Minsky argues that the show "co-opts feminist rhetoric to promote an anti-feminist agenda" - pretending to be about empowering women, while instead shaming their style as too lower-class or insufficiently corporate-America. On the one hand, yes, the show does exactly that. On the other, though, it's all very pragmatic. The advice is, people will judge you by how you look, and you want to be conscious in the choices you're making. If you want to project corporate, neither the sweatsuit nor the ill-fitting-lingerie-as-daywear will get that across.

In a way, then, it gets back at the "Frances Ha" maturity question: A part of growing up means getting past the idea that being true to yourself in self-defeating ways is some kind of sacred authenticity. Getting what you want out of life might involve a bit of superficial selling out, and that's not the end of the world. Not all quirkiness is self-defeating, so maturity also means figuring out which to hang onto. But there's a way that resistance to superficial conformity can be a crutch. Deciding that your fundamental being is expressed only by wearing outrageous clothes is a way to avoid facing the difficult challenges that going for whichever professional or personal goals might bring. The conceit of the show may be cruel, but its central message isn't entirely unreasonable.

-Random thoughts from the last Savage Lovecast:

1) I hadn't been following Santa-race-gate, because it seemed, as Savage says, remarkably idiotic. Racist in a way that doesn't even need to be spelled out. To the point where, what more could I add? But then Savage himself goes on this well-meaning tirade about it, the crux of which is, Santa might have been white because St. Nicholas was from Turkey, whereas Jesus couldn't have been, because he was Jewish and from the Middle East. Huh? An interesting view into Savage's own, somewhat unique ideas about how America defines whiteness, but the proper response was what he implicitly began with - that it's a bunch of racist nonsense worth noting only to raise awareness that racism in this country isn't over.

2) The call from the 21-year-old debating whether to enter a threesome with a couple she'd met online (what college these days has come to!) was indeed amusing for the no-longer-21 set. The dilemma was, would she possibly be attracted to them, given that they're... drumroll please... in their 30s? The oldest person this woman had ever been attracted to was, she emphasized, 26. Savage clearly found this hilarious, and went on about how "decrepit" these people must be.

Alas, it's a useful if bleak reality check for the ancient among us. Is 30 (-something) young? It's not as if the 30-plus can correct the under-25s who see 30 as old. It's subjective. And while it's certainly possible this 21-year-old has a warped idea of what 30-something looks like, it could also be that she has a very accurate idea, which is that these are likely people who look between 9 and 19 years older than she does, and that while this isn't a problem for many 21-year-olds, it would be for her. It's not necessarily that she imagines 35-year-olds look 85.