Never mind, never mind

-"My roots, I don’t dye. I used to dye the tips. I think they call it a balayage: it’s painted-on bleach that they put just into the ends. I think I’ll continue doing it, otherwise I look really Greek." This from a half-German, half-Greek, fully-oblivious fashion director. This totally destroys my theory of ombré: that it's a style perfect for women with naturally dark hair who enjoy having dark hair, who look best with dark hair, but who want to shake things up without much damaging their hair or much changing their look, in the way that women with light hair can do without involving any bleach. No, never mind, it's all racial self-hatred. 

-So Prudie makes these up, right?

[L]ast week I got a nasty email from one of the mothers. I sent some homemade cookies and store-bought veggies and dip for the snack last week, and apparently this was not up to snuff! The mothers said that my vegetables were clearly not homegrown and organic and that they could taste the pesticides and preservatives on them. [...] I emailed them back saying that I was unsure what particular brands of veggies, dip, and baking items to buy, and received another email suggesting I start a garden. Prudie, we live in an apartment complex. [....] I went to the farmers market an hour away last weekend to look for some appropriate items to send for next week, but the market was so expensive. I don't want my daughter to get kicked out of this playgroup [...]

That, or the problem with these moms (setting aside the screw loose in the head of the social-climbing letter-writer herself) isn't that they're highfalutin snobs, but that they're some kind of extremist hippie collective. This is a letter that wants to be about socioeconomic class, but is in fact about a small subset of lunatics, or one unfortunate mom not getting sarcasm. This is not normal behavior for yuppie parents. I refuse to believe it. But what if it is?

Over the weekend

-Saw the notorious, inescapable first episode of "Girls." It's definitely funny, as well as refreshing to have a self-deprecating, underdog female character who's a) the star, and b) not played by a glossy size-four actress. As for the "privilege" angle, I thought the episode actually got at something quite interesting. On the one hand, we're meant to roll our eyes at the protagonist, Hannah, to consider her spoiled and entitled, and to remember that she's white, straight, able-bodied, the only child of an intact marriage, a college graduate, etc. On the other, it tells us something about our times that a college graduate might have been going to work at an office - and not even a very glamorous one - for a whole year without receiving a paycheck. Is Hannah a brat for even taking an unpaid internship, post-college, without side jobs (or - and one might imagine otherwise from the buzz around the show - a trust fund), and expecting her lower-end-of-upper-middle-class parents (profs somewhere outside NYC) to foot the bill? Or is this simply what's replaced entry-level work in many fields, and a recent college grad can think she's doing everything right, only to confront parents who never got the memo that dependency reaches up to 30 these days? By all means, criticize the fact that we're being subjected to yet another show about a group of friends, in their 20s, in New York, and of the Caucasian persuasion. But the show at least says something about that milieu, and isn't merely set there because that's the natural place to set a TV show (think "Rules of Engagement").

-These lemon bars are amazing. I used the same size tin the recipe suggests, but halved it, and completely lost track of the various cooking times, probably undercooking the base and overcooking the whole thing once assembled. Whatever it was, it worked out great. I look forward to celebrating a no-cavity trip to the dentist with a couple more.

-Philadelphia is the city closest to where I live, except not near at all if you don't have a car. But there are such things as car-sharing programs and spouses who know how to drive, so I've now been twice since the move. What I wish I could recommend, but would strongly advise against, is the Reading Terminal Market. I pictured something along the lines of Chelsea Market or a Montreal food market, minus the fashion-folk and Frenchness, respectively. Instead, it was a wide range of cuisines, each represented by a tub of grease or muck. "Chicken basil" at a Thai place was a tub of red oil. "Eclair" at an Amish stand was some kind of gelatinous pudding. The best bet seemed to be pizza, but this turned out to be the very worst pizza ever: cheese tasted freezer-burnt, sauce tasted how vomit smells. A few rungs below amusement-park pizza, yet $3.25 a plain slice and part of an Italian festival being held in the market. Oh well.

Then we walked through an area that looked very much like the less-appealing bits of Fulton Street in Manhattan (or, I suppose, in Brooklyn), which slowly morphed into a posh-generic shopping district, and culminated in a square that sometimes has a farmers' market but this wasn't one of those times. We ended up in a West Village-ish area, with a West Village-ish name. I had an iced coffee in a hipster coffee shop and an avocado-mango salad at what might have been a gay bar with a menu. Just as we were starting to get situated, just as I was at the point of appreciating the city for itself and not comparing it to familiar neighborhoods in my overrepresented hometown (although, to be fair, this is my blog, and not a TV show, for now at least), it was time to return to the poodle. More for another time.

Now the women of the household are both ombré. And, in this photo, very nearly asleep.

-So I finished the process of re-ombréing the tips of my hair, this time with the stronger Manic Panic bleach. The first attempt had produced bright yellow tips, and no real fade effect. The second appears to have worked. Ombré may be so last season, or so three years ago, but it remains the coward's ideal radical change-of-style: it can be removed with one haircut, or tucked into a bun. Whichever damage there is to one's hair texture or professional appearance is easily hidden or reversed. It's the only semi-permanent hair-dye experience available to those with very dark hair. It's not going anywhere.

On looking as stylish as possible while writing a dissertation in the woods with a poodle and some scientists

Need a change of hairstyle, and considering a return to one of the old standbies: bangs or ombré. Bangs have the advantages of, I could still look conservative if need be, and I'm fond enough of my natural hair color and 28 enough to have a sense that time with it without gray is finite. Disadvantages: they're a hassle to maintain, a potentially expensive hassle, so I'd end up trimming them myself and looking less than professionally (glances over at Bisou) groomed. And then there's the day-to-day maintenance of them - even for the most "natural" of looks, they need to be styled (think hair dryer and flatiron), whereas my hair in its current state does not. Ombré, meanwhile, would be all kinds of crazy expensive to have done professionally, but why would I do such a thing? After the initial investment of $11.50, there's no particular maintenance involved, other than going through a bit more conditioner.

Ombré envy

After DIY ombré involving three bleachings of the tips of my hair required a de-ombré-ing haircut, I thought that urge was out of my system. But this is possibly the best version I've seen, albeit on a hair type utterly different from my own. I agree with the commenter who's suspicious that the look just happened that way as hair-dye was growing out, as it looks a bit too perfect for that. But in an alternate universe in which I'd live in a city, get my hair dyed professionally, and have free time for non-poodle-related activities, this is the photo I'd take to the salon.

Eternal youth

-For a change, a Parisian woman complains about how skinny women are in New York. And, alas, makes about as much sense as anyone could who begins a post by musing, "Have you ever had lunch with a New Yorker? Really, it’s not far from an episode of Sex and the City." To be fair, she means New Yorkers working in the fashion industry. Maybe she's right? Anyway, someone needs to tell her that portions are not huge in NY. Certainly not in fashion-y Manhattan spots she no doubt goes to, and that she's now blaming for weight gain that (prepare to shed a tear) has prevented her from fitting into her skinny jeans. Thing is, Europeans have been told for their entire lives that in America, the portions are immense, so when they come to Soho and get a plate with one local-sustainable arugula sprout curled up at the center, and that's it, they react by announcing that they've been forced to down a plate of chili fries by the Great American Conspiracy. Cold, hard evidence in the form of portions that would not sustain an especially inactive elderly socialite is nothing in the face of what Europeans just know.

But it's so much fun to blame weight gain on 'merica! Mireille Giuliano built a second career on that concept. Maybe it's the bagels! Or maybe a dumbed-down version of Michael Pollan - Mark Bittman will suffice?

So maybe this isn’t something I can speak abut as I don’t know anything about that, but one thing’s for sure, the laws are totally different about things like what growth hormones you can feed beef and chicken to make them grow faster. I don’t know how all this affects our weight, but I don’t see how it could help but get into the milk, eggs and meat. It’s crazy. I was talking with Emily, my Australian friend who just got here to NYC and she also gained 10 pounds just like that (It’s known as the little house warming gift in NYC – Hello! Welcome! Here’s 10 pounds!). Plus here, not only did were we getting fatter – the fat seemed softer. Yeurk.

Yeah, totally! Doré must've put on a few not because metabolisms slow down as we age, but from all these weird chemicals in American food, specifically engineered to make otherwise flawless foreign women fat. Remember Edina Monsoon in "Fat," the AbFab episode in which she insists that her heft is "much more likely to be an allergy to something. A build-up of toxins or a hormone imbalance" than the result of her overeating and lack of exercise? I guess the fashion-person way is to find some absurd yet so-very-now reason for looking sub-optimal in a pair of tight jeans. Man, I wish Edina were real, and had a blog.

-Dorm life is all too fresh in my mind. The one I lived in most recently in Paris was no-frills to say the least. That the (shared) bathroom was ostensibly cleaned a few times a week didn't mean there wasn't that smeared on the walls, or that running water would come forth from the bathroom sink. The communal showers were not for those with an aversion to mold. The walls between the rooms were made out of tissue-paper or something, such that when my neighbor came by to complain that he could hear me talking at 5 in the evening on a Sunday, he kind of had a point. All told, this was maybe not the best situation to move into at 27, but it allowed me to get a lot of research done in Paris, and perhaps the stress of that living situation helped close friendships form among many of us.

The stress of proximity and a standard of living well below that which most have prior to and following their university experiences is, however, zilch compared with that of sharing a bedroom - as in, one room, one door - with a stranger, something rather different also, it should be noted, from what most post-college roommate situations look like. We hear alllll the time about the fancy and schmancy amenities offered to today's spoiled undergrad, yet as soon as this discussion arises, it's always all about how there simply isn't the room-aka-money to give every entering student a tiny cell of his own. This is no doubt more true of some schools than others (plenty of UChicago dorms I can think of could be subdivided for privacy), but the reason the two-per-room set-up persists is that we-as-a-society think it's at worst an acceptable way to save space, at best a fundamental part of the college experience. It shouldn't be - it's too much to ask kids to spend their first year of college being some unenlightened roommate's 24/7 "learning experience." This is not your first time hearing it here, but Flavia has a great post on the matter, so I'm sending you her way.

-I've been de-ombréd, in the form of a haircut. Apparently bleaching the ends of my hair twice, then putting a pink dye over that, then attempting various methods (dandruff shampoo, dish soap, more bleach) to get it out brought the ends to a state for which no conditioner was deep enough. The past few days, and even on my way to the salon, I saw all these girls (nah, not so many women) with ombré perfection, and did feel some regret. But I now look much more professional, which is important for editing down an article attempt at home in my pajamas.