Searching for a ballgown

Fifi told me she knew a good couturier who could help make my dress. We planned to meet on Monday to go look at fabric stores together.* What I didn’t realize beforehand but was most pleased to discover was that the dressmaker was coming to be my personal shopping assistant. All I needed was a little dog in a handbag to round out the scene.

We started by going to her studio, (Atelier de Hippie, which Neela and I found amusing), to look at some examples of her work. Adèle tried to get me to try on a tiny gold dress she had made for a friend of hers. I stepped behind the curtain, pulled it up to my hips and called out that it ah, wasn’t going to work. Incredulous, she stepped back to assist – here, try it from above, wait, just hold still – and gave up when, with one of my arms in and one out, the fabric refused to wiggle over my ribs and we started laughing. Then Fifi tried and it fit like a glove and she stepped out looking stunning. Please though, I’m American. The comparison just isn’t fair.

Adèle took us from shop to shop, greeting her friends behind the counter and introducing me to all the luscious fabrics that could be wrapped all around my body. In one shop were a bunch of colorful African and Indian batik prints, patterns and colors that made me feel like I was in a candy store and instantly imbued me with visual ADD. In another was a little girl singing songs to herself and jumping around with a doll. Her mother, the saleswoman, told her to hush but I hoped she wouldn’t because her voice was almost as cute as her bashful two-foot high smile. In the last one we visited we were helped by an Arab woman who spoke a very nice English and French and laid out soft and shimmery fabrics that glided just so over our fingers.

As I gushed over fabric at the final store and told Fifi “There are so many pretty things!” she dryly responded, “Then which one do you want?” I got the message - they’d had enough. Some might call my indecision exhausting, but I like to think of it as careful deliberation which (usually) leads to a wise and well-informed course of action. But you say tomato, and so after two hours and with a fistful of samples to consider overnight, I let them go. I spent the rest of the afternoon browsing Anthropologie and Nordstrom.com and wrote Hannah to find inspiration.

And sitting there mid-search, it donged on me that here I was, liberated. Having a dress made means I can indulge in complete creative license. With the maker right there at my disposal, anything I could imagine is possible, along with a lot of things I can’t. Torn asunder from the rules of fashion and cultural conformities that pinch us in the shape and size of the moment! No going into the store and having to choose among racks of redundant designs that everyone and their mother wears for me! Right here in my grasp: ultimate freedom, the chance to make and own something totally unique. I turn my back on the bland, I refuse to settle for what’s in season, I outright defy the style du jour. What did I do next?

I went with the simplest design possible. Full circle, came I. By scrutinizing bushels of pictures and pawing through armfuls of fancy fabrics, I either got scared and retreated back to my first option or felt like the first one was just more and more validated. I mean, of course, it was definitely the latter.

I went to the market the next day with Livy to pick out a classic yet classy African fabric. We swept past the unidentifiable and nauseating smells at the entrance, past the distended-belly babies and the legless men with collection cups, past the stands with a 12-foot high assortment of foreign condiments and straight into the canopies of color. There, unavoidably, we disappeared into the narrow aisle, feasting our eyes up and down either wall of us to scan all the possibilities against a soundtrack of “Hey sista, this one very pretty!”

I felt like I was in a paper store, surrounded by pretty things and not really having a use for them but wanting to scoop them all up, take them home, and be happy in the fact of having so much prettiness in my possession. I ended up with a black fabric with large bold abstract flowers (or petals, I’m not really sure) in red and yellow. I talked the seller down from $20 to $15 and gave him $16. I thought Adèle would kill me when I showed up and said I had chosen something entirely apart from the dozens of fabrics we saw yesterday (and I didn’t dare mention that I found it in a quarter of the time). She smiled, understood, and went to taking my new measurements. I realize I really enjoy having measurements taken.

I pick it up on Halloween to wear to the Marine Ball on Saturday. If anybody from home wants something made and can send me measurements and a request, I’d be delighted to go shopping for you!

*Sidenote: Monday was a holiday to commemorate a massacre of schoolchildren that took place in 1993. The assassination of then President Ndadaye occurred the day before as a signal for the killing to start. These events precluded the quick descent into genocide and a decade-long civil war.

Kids These Days: Part II

In a recent column, David Brooks gave us an alternative to the young professionals: the unrushed adventurers. What defines them? Well...

After graduation, they’ll spend a few years in different jobs, maybe they’ll go to graduate school and then they’ll figure out something more definite – or not. They’ll live in another country or two before they hit 30, or they’ll spend a year hiking/fishing/climbing/sailing/being outdoors. They are pretty good at packing all of their belongings in a car, or even in a few pieces of luggage. They’re not actively looking for “the one” and they’re not planning on doing anything permanent anytime soon. In life, in love or in work, they’re open to the idea of changing any plans they had because they don’t know all their options yet. They've got nothing against stability, but they don’t see a need for it, personally. They have long-term goals… they’re just not sure what they are yet. They are floating through their Odyssey years.

Wait, did I say they? Cause it sounds a lot like a lot of my friends and more than a little like me, dabbling in various interests, ambitious if uncertain, easily excited and uneasily committed. Yuck, it's always annoying to be pegged (by David Brooks, no less).

It’s definitely a luxury to be able to dawdle through our twenties like this, but according to Brooks’s column, everybody who can is doing it these days. "Odyssey years" is his term to describe the time when we’re off trying to figure things out before life requires that decision be made. No longer is finding yourself just a college thing. We’re extending the indecision into “real life.”

Personal mentality is part of it, but even more than that, it’s a function of a cultural change (hence the merit as a Times Op-Ed). The whole transition lifestyle has become a perfectly valid post-graduation option these days, right up there with going to work for the man or starting a family. And if my friends are any example of the larger population, it’s actually way more popular. Just to take a handful of examples:

Brian and Stephen went to Ramallah in the West Bank to teach in a Quaker school, neither of them Quaker or having extensively studied the Middle East. Anna took a road trip across the country and worked as a waitress in Oregon. Heather and Amon are working on environmental something-or-other in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for a year. Robert left Wall Street and is traveling to a different Asian city every week and writing a novel. Then there are the friends in Peace Corps, Americorps, and Teach for America, all programs which last a year or two by design and draw in students from every background. And I’m in a country I had never heard of until last year, unsure of where I’ll be two months from now, or eight months from then, but I imagine it will be two different places.

The adventure itself is good. The tricky thing is we aren’t always sure of our reasons for taking it, and that’s where we should be wary. Brooks writes that we’re not just wasting time; on the contrary, people are doing it with very professional goals. We’re very aware of how we can use these experiences in the future… what's disconcerting is that we might be primarily using them for those goals. We’ve been heavily groomed in interview skills and programmed to pursue extra curriculars and encouraged if not forced to seek out unique life experience that will impress someone at some point. We're so conditioned that we’ve almost made routine the quest for adventure, forgetting that the adventure has its own inherent value.

To some degree, it’s fine to combine those experiences with more concrete objectives. What’s not okay is how doing so can keep you from living in the moment. Contextualizing youth in terms of adulthood keeps us from indulging in full revelry, and leads us to take ourselves and all we do much too seriously. And on that point, Brooks paints a very vivid picture of the ambitious kid who has lost the free-spirited excitement for life. In a different article, he wrote about professionalized adolescence with a clever allusion to modern-day interpretations of Kerouac’s On The Road. It’s worth reading, but to sum up:

“If Sal Paradise were alive today, he’d be a product of the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga, on the road to the M.L.A. convention with a documentary about a politically engaged Manitoban dance troupe that he hopes will win a MacArthur grant.”

Though impressive, the new-rules Sal is a tool, almost pathetic in his desire to impress. He’s constantly caught up in how he’ll fit his experience onto a resume, and constantly updating his resume. He goes on adventures bescause that’s what you do now and it makes great cocktail party conversation. He is interested in this stuff, but mostly because everyone else is. The new Sal isn't the protagonist of On the Road, but rather of Getting to the End of the Road.

So the question is – is that why we do it? Do we embark upon these travels and take up these causes because we’re wowed by them or because we know others will be? And if it’s a bit of both, are we finding the right balance?

I thought about this in the context of Nicholas Handler’s article (see previous post), because in a lot of way, Brooks and Handler are describing the same person. Handler’s Che t-shirt kid will soon grow into Brook’s power yoga grad student. He will replace the trendy and impressive activist causes he pursued in college with the trendy and impressive Odyssey years experiences. Our adventures, like our activism, assume a professional veneer inspired by current fads, and we’re a little bit opportunistic about everything.

Sliminess aside, the most detrimental part of this habit is the toll it takes on the bright young overachievers. College was my Odyssey primer when, with my friends who wanted to accomplish everything and often thought we could, we forgot how not to be stressed and prided ourselves on being able to sleep the least. We obviously cared about what we were doing but we probably cared more about how much we got done, so we lived out an unofficial competition who could collect the most marks of success: exotic travels, fancy internships, leadership titles and competitive grants – these were our gold stars, good for both social status and personal statements.

In the end, we got really good at taking ourselves seriously. We might have gotten a lot done, but the way we did it was a little bit sad. Looking back on that, I want my Odyssey years to be a chance to step away from the exhausting and not very healthy trend of investing all of yourself in everything. Because sometimes you have to remind yourself that some things are more important than the important stuff. That there doesn’t have to be a point to everything, and the trivialities of life are ultimately just as valuable as the big stuff. That walking on a dirt road or dancing like a fool or staying up till sunrise are not the stuff of interview banter but they are the secret behind a reminiscing smile that will far outlast your latest resume. A great thing about those moments and experiences is that they are for you and they are for your friends but you’re not going to be judged on them, in an interview or anywhere else. They are yours.

Brooks ends the Sal Paradise article with this:

“Someday some hypermanic kid will produce a moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey that will spark the overdue rebellion among all the over-pressured SAT grinds, and us grumpy midlife critics will get to witness a new Kerouac, and the greatest pent-up young-life crisis in the history of the world.”

I hope it happens when I’m still in my Odyssey years. It sounds like good fun. :)

Kids These Days: Part I

Lately the New York Times has been all about some commentary on college kids and twenty-somethings and what we’re doing with our lives. David Brooks says we’re taking longer to find ourselves and we’re taking ourselves more seriously in the process. Tom Friedman thinks we’re playing it too cool and says the reserved activism of today is for wussies. A Yale history major’s says we’re writing a revolution, we’re just trying not to look too into it.

Since I happen to be one of those wussies taking myself too seriously and trying to save the world but pretending not to care, I've been thinking a lot about it. This is as much as I could organize the first part of my thoughts, but more to come.

Nicholas Handler set off a comment board frenzy when NYT revealed his essay as the winner of a national student essay contest on “Why College Matters.” His response, a curious effort to blend blasé and idealism, drew enthusiasm from a few sympathizers and harsh dejection from more than a few disappointed readers. So yeah, he didn’t present anything very new, hardly anything cogent and on the whole the article was more annoying than entertaining. In a kind of sad way, he finally answers the question “why college matters” with the unexpected and incredibly uninspiring summed-up response: online organizing. It’s the activist style du jour, the response of the rally cry-skeptics, tired of prefab protests and trying to get at change from another angle. And our parents, and especially Tom Friedman, just don’t get it.

In light of his own lackluster take on activism, I can't help but think he was trying to polish off the essay with something nice and hopeful but he’s not even sure he has convinced himself, so it came out very strained. That said, in some nuggets of his article are very on. This is the passage that stuck out to me:

“On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. […] We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Guevara tee-shirt.”

For the most part, I’m with him. More than a few of the social justice sparkplugs that I went to school with are flippant about getting involved, doing it as much for the t-shirt as to raise the extra $1 of the t-shirt’s proceeds that go to charity. They like the idea of the cause more than they know about the cause. (I’ve already said my piece on the shirts.)

The more interesting thing he hits on is the transformation of activism that results from everyone getting fed up with the over-hyped LiveStrong bracelets. From the sixties picket-sign stereotype, we’ve been strewn in two directions: first plasticization and now professionalism. The first part of it consists of the Che t-shirt (or bikini) wearers who don’t know who Che is. This type is certainly still around and in full force, but the others are coming out of the woodwork now. Handler calls the professional side “the organization kid,” someone who is using savvy and non-traditional methods of activism to make things happen. I think a better term is the divestment kid, (maybe even the DMill), who is wearing suits and attending board meetings to persuade some pretty big wigs to move their money out of Sudan. And ironically enough, those two work very much in tandem on campuses these days.

Facebook, as ever, provides the case in point. NYT shows that three of the most popular tags for Handler’s essay are “facebook,” “activism,” and “Darfur.” Facebook Darfur activism. Our activism is conducted through social, sometimes superficial and incredibly image-conscious means. At its core, Facebook is a tool for expression – yes, you can use it to retrieve information but it’s real purpose is to dish it out. You can definitely still go to a campus Darfur event without a facebook RSVP, but you use it anyway because the planners want to be seen as the planners, the attendees want to be seen as attendees, and the MIAs wait to decide to go until after they see the guest list. It's personal marketing for free. The organization kid knows how important it is and seizes the masses through an e-invite. (The divestment kid goes a step further.)

It all comes down to what I think would be Handler's activism timeline:

1. Activism defined sixties style: Hyped-up, long haired, peace sign, rally crying, poster carrying rebels with a good cause.
2. Activist spin-off causes burst out from the seams: Hunger, AIDS, tsunamis, polar bears… how can one girl choose?!
   
3. Activists and wannabes lose their credibility; kitsch activism emerges: For every 100,000 people that join this facebook group, I will donate $1 to Darfur.
4. The post-modernists point and laugh and turn up the Shins.
5. The new activists decide to change tactics. Welcome Dan Millenson.
   

But as far Handler’s critique of our post-modern refusal to define an overarching theme, can you blame us? You’ve just got to chalk it up to the fact that we are immature and we don’t know what drives us and we’re not rushing to decide to what causes we want to dedicate our lives. And in that sense, it’s okay that we’re a little cheeky with our activism and that dip our feet in here and there without any larger cohesive theme or purpose. Political parties exist to weave an overarching narrative, it’s up to individuals (especially young ones) to figure out where they fit – or not – within that. Fickleness is in part the point and in part the luxury of youth.

It just means we get to embark upon the Odyssey years to figure it all out. (Next.)