Fierce in Your Fifties
Labels: Fashion, Fierce at 50
A High WASP stops to consider..
Labels: Fashion, Fierce at 50
However, I do like to read the best examples of the stuff I don't like. On my good days, this helps me expand my perspective. On my bad High WASP days it allows me the secret and harmful-only-to-my-soul pleasure of disdain. There you have it. Ideas anyone?
Labels: Fashion
Labels: working for a living
Labels: blogosphere
Would the flutes, the most almost-tasteful items be chosen? No. Unfortunately, no. None of the items in the bottom row would make it. The card box is out because a) High WASPs don't give cards with money in them as presents b) the only abstract heart logo we endorse is Elsa Peretti's. The Love aisle runner is out, because decor is too sacred to mess around with and any emotion is too serious to walk on. The personalized flutes are out because SOMEONE MIGHT THINK WE MEANT IT! This is the worst outcome, to have someone think we thought these were OK when they are not. You see, we could maybe two Reidel flutes, or Kosta Boda. Even Waterford is a little too too unless your grandmother owned them first. We could really only use flutes at all if someone had given us a set of 12, or else the hotel handed them to us via someone dressed in a black jacket.
But you absolutely might find any of the objects in the top row at a High WASP wedding. "They are not very tasteful!", you might exclaim with an indrawn breath. No. They are kitsch. There is a fine but perilous line between tacky+cheesy, and kitsch. Kitsch is OK. Kitsch is on purpose. Kitsch is not you-tried-to-have-good-taste-but-failed. Kitschy things are what they are. A camera decorated with wedding roses? A light up colored alcohol drink fountain? A set of bride and groom bubble blowers? These things are what they are. They are not trying to be anything else. This above all the High WASP cherishes. Perhaps because we have decent hearts and shun artifice. Perhaps because we want each item to stay in its category and not try to pass itself off as high class, a status reserved for the few. Even I don't know which is the right answer and it's possible both are true. Possible, and terribly confusing when you are growing up.
Labels: weddings
Labels: motherhood
Sources, clockwise from upper left: design*sponge, design*sponge, for me for you
But now they are cozying clocks. Don’t they know that time is cold? Time doesn’t care one whit for crochet. You can’t cute up time, make it into a bunny, add some spring flowers and a fey frond or two. Time is not cozy. DIY all you want you cannot DIY immortality. Although the God in which I do not believe knows the human race can’t be stopped from trying.
Source: design*sponge
Labels: ironic crafts
All the freshmen in those days ate at Commons. Ceilings close to 3 stories high. More dark, more stone. We stood in line to enter. One of the very first nights I was standing there in line by myself on the sidewalk. A boy stood in front of me. He turned. I was wearing jeans I had patched with pride, an Outward Bound logo squarely on my seat. In my "alternative" high school we had done survival training as part of the curriculum. I had a bandana on my head, probably navy blue but still, really? a bandana, pirate-style. The boy was wearing pants the color of faded strawberries. A button down shirt. A needlepoint belt with some small figures, could have been whales, could have been lacrosse sticks. I was not familiar with the secret life of belts in those days.
The boy asked me why I wore the bandana on my head. I was very nervous. I said in what I thought was a joke but actually was a manifestation of my discomfort, “Because my hair is dirty.” The boy was silent, unable to find a response. He turned away. Later it turned out that the boy was the son of someone everybody said was a member of La Cosa Nostra. Probably his belt was protective coloring, a disguise. But who can know at 17?
That’s just one piece. Here’s the other. I wrote my senior thesis, on Metaphor and Metonymy - List and Catalogues in Epic Poetry (the young are entitled to some hubris after all), in a study carrel, a small metal locker for people, combination lock and everything. I would go sit, read, write. Eat peanut M&Ms from a yellow 1-lb bag. Sit, read, write some more. And I would feel drunk. High. Stoned. Drunk on the workings of my own raw brain. I don’t mean to sound arrogant. That’s what it felt like at 21.
This is my own particular version of Princeton. It is embarassing to discuss here, in public, because it is so much the emblem of privilege and yet so important to me in my personal identity. What I say is true. I do not know if it is important.
Labels: Princeton, social dislocation
From a user experience site...get the irony?
Now when I wake up, I feel my consciousness before anything. It tickles. Yes, tickles is as close as I can get. If waking up were a noise it would be a little bit like a baby making exploratory vowel sounds, “Aaah, aaah, oooob, oobb.” It’s a little bit like my awake self says “Hi there” to my asleep self. Like they are both there at the same time for a brief minute.
Now when I wake up I look out the window and guess what time it is. Although it no longer matters. I do it just because when nothing has happened yet in my day I like the meaning of the light coming through the Chinese elm into my window.
Waterston, one of four siblings, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother, Alice Tucker (née Atkinson), was an American Mayflower descendant and worked as a landscape painter, and his father, George Chychele Waterston, was an immigrant from Leith, Scotland and a semanticist and language teacher.[1][2] Waterston attended both the Brooks School, a boarding school in North Andover, Massachusetts, and the Groton School. He entered Yale University on a scholarship in 1958 and graduated with a BA in 1962.Iyeeeee! The Mayflower, landscape painting, Scottish immigrants AND a semanticist in one family tree? Yale is superfluous in his case. In the photo below he looks as silly as he does for one simple reason. He is very very embarrassed to be bowling and even more embarassed to be wearing a bowling shirt. High WASPs like to wear only what they have chosen to be their particular uniform.
Labels: motherhood
Bride: Oscar de la Renta . Images: Clockwise, Fifth Floor, Mrs. Tiramisu, Classic Wedding Car Hire, Flickr, Saipua, Camilla Flowers, City Hall, Overstock.com
Labels: weddings
Cyberoptix Tie Lab via A Practical Wedding
Speaking of cohorts: “This is not a tie”. Yes. This is how High WASPs address weddings. Either they say, “This is a wedding, nothing more, nothing less. We will not discuss the implications.” Or they say, “This? This little thing? This isn’t a wedding. We just happen to be getting married. I promise.” The image above is from the bride blog that I think addresses weddings and the wedding industry from a clear space. A Practical Wedding. Meg’s premise is that weddings ought to be first and foremost the creation and the reflection of the people getting married. Well, yeah. But that simple premise can be difficult to realize. Why?
1. The minute that two people say to each other, “Maybe we will get married some day….,” someone somewhere senses the possibility of large sums of money. Planning a wedding can be like trying to take a romantic walk down a mountain path, only large billboards block the view on either side. Silicon Valley billboards too, the kinds that light up and blink, and change, and tell you the future is now.
2. Weddings create marriages. And marriages create families. And created families have meaning for the families of origin. And meaning creates opinions.
3. Weddings create parents. And parents create children, and children are our only real hope of thwarting death. In our hearts. If you remember, I find death to be a real problem. A lot of mythic weight, then.
Brides have to make their way through a dynamic industry where high voltage technology changes and branding fervor run rampant. Then they have their own culture and their own family emotions to navigate. Then they have the human myth of living forever telling itself in the background.
No wonder. But tulle is a lovely narcotic. And the enduring pursuit of an aesthetic is the same instinct that drives artists. It endures. So I love weddings. And I love wedding blogs. And I hope the little fish of personal hope at the heart of most weddings keeps everyone going while the industry clashes and trumpets above.
Labels: weddings
Labels: weddings
Labels: high WASP
Labels: weddings
The final effect is one of respecting all conventions and yet indicating that one might somehow rise above them. Of making a gesture towards love, but quickly, so that no embarassment can be felt, by anyone. Frankly it's all pretty exhausting. And while what I'm saying is true, I'm exaggerating. You have to exaggerate to be able to describe all this, and once exaggerated it sounds worse than it is. For the most part. And BTW I made the invitation up:).
Labels: high WASP, invitations, ironic crafts, weddings
Labels: bags, Fashion, high WASP, Interesting Brands, Shoes
Labels: high WASP
Labels: Interesting Brands, Midlife
Labels: ironic crafts
Labels: ironic crafts
High WASPs may or may not be religious. They may or may not have attended an Ivy League college. They may or may not live in a large house with stables out back. But they all subscribe to the High WASP code of conduct. You learn tenets of the code as you grow up, starting as a very young child, and continuing throughout your life.
Note that this is a draft. My sister hasn’t confirmed yet that I have this right. Others may also have ideas. High WASPs believe in the civil exchange of opposing opinions.
The High WASP Code of Conduct
1. Look people in the eye when you shake hands.
2. Stand up straight. High WASPs are obsessed with posture.
3. Do what you said you would do. Including show up on time. Two minutes early is even better.
4. Assume that others will behave as you behave. That others also know the rules. Play by the rules.
5. Speak about others only as you are prepared to have them speak about you. Never ever try to make anyone feel bad.
6. Vote and give to charitable causes.
7. Use your good silver and linen tablecloths as often as you can.
8. When you are beaten, or badly treated, forgive when possible rather than seek revenge. Revenge is childish.
9. Bad taste, vulgarity, and ostentation, however, are most difficult to forgive. This will make #5 a very difficult tenet to adhere to.
10. Send sincere, thoughtful condolences in the event of death.
11. Always, always remember: A simple thank you will suffice.
Labels: high WASP
Labels: food
Labels: The Death Problem
Labels: mom's house
You will notice there is a town called Greenfield. This is not an accident. The drive from Silicon Valley to Santa Barbara, then, is a palimpsest (big word of the day meaning layers of painted history) of California from the present, to the past, and back. As follows:
+ Earth-toned tract homes (High WASPs don't like the term home meaning house but it is just too prevalent in this world to avoid it)
+ Large outlet malls selling clothes named after male golf players (where is the Michelle Wie line of clothing I wonder?)
+ Home-made garlic product stores with handpainted signs advising that cherries too can be found there
+ A concrete culvert, full of recent rain, recovering from an urban dream and harboring new low pale green marsh grass and two white egrets
+ Broccoli
+ More broccoli
+ Yet more broccoli, this time fronted by a 16 foot high cut out painted sign of a farmer, and words that say, “Now Growing – Broccoli”
+ Latin-inspired colored tract homes (this is how you know you are approaching Southern California, granite colored stucco is replaced by coral)
+ Large outlet malls
Labels: mom's house
Labels: ironic crafts, weddings
Labels: career, The Death Problem