Fashionista Reality Check

Monday's CBS News had a segment about how, in this economy, it is challenging for recent college grads to find full-time employment at a level appropriate for their degree.  Many are living with their parents, working part-time, unemployed, or working in jobs that don't require a college degree.  I get that.  Times are tough, and it's really hard to land that first job out of college.

My quibble is with who they chose to interview for this story, a 23-year-old English major who is living at home with her parents while trying to get a full-time job in the fashion industry.  She is working as a part-time intern for Fashionista and working part-time at another website.  Despite her college degree, she makes $300 a week. 

The Fashionista website has a recent article about unpaid interns in the fashion industry which concludes with this sentence: "Still, these interns put in 80-hour weeks for free. With pleasure."  Aw, bless their hearts!

The problem is not that the fashion industry is not hiring due to the poor economy.  The fashion industry is structured around unpaid intern labor and an extremely high bar for entry.  Unlike, say, human resources.  Or accounting.  Or computer science.  A different way to look at it is, certain industries only grant access to those who have "paid their dues" in a way that is only realistic for members of the upper-class.

Here is what the real story here is: Young college grads from privileged families are able to do what it takes to pursue the dreams that their college degrees were supposed to give them access to (according to *The American Dream*), but those who are not able to live rent-free producing no income for years of unpaid internships are unable to fulfill those dreams despite having the same degree.

It's preposterous that CBS News picked someone trying to break into the fashion industry, who did not go to fashion school, on the east coast, as an example to represent the impact of the economy on college students nationwide.  The sacrifices required to break in to certain industries often depend on either luck or really wealthy parents who are untroubled by their offspring's much-prolonged journey to adulthood.  So essentially, a college degree often does little to overcome the barriers presented by social class.


This leads me to wonder, what would my dream have been if the barriers to breaking into an industry, however high, were completely manageable due to my social class and parental expectations?  Break into publishing as a book editor?  Be an artist unafraid of hunger and failure?  Start my own nonprofit knowing I have an endless safety net if it doesn't work out?  Take three years to write a book or start a business that may or may not allow me to ever fund a roof over my head?  Try to be an Oprah, or have my own magazine, or become a top freelance writer or consultant?

Some dreams I'm just too scared of, and that's my own issue I need to work on.  For some dreams, I value independence and my lifestyle too much to attempt.  But other dreams, well, I just am not and never have been in a place that allows for doing years of unpaid internships in order to gain access to not even the dream itself but just to the road to start to attain it. 

I was an English major, same as the woman who they interviewed.  Maybe I should do an internship to try to be an astronaut!  Here's what actually happened: while in school, I had a grantwriting internship that I balanced with my classes and part-time paid job at a furniture store.  After graduation, I worked full-time in a mind-numbing job as a legal secretary before getting a full-time grant-writing job (which, granted, I felt very fortunate to get).  I was horrified to work with some 20-year-old interns recently who had never had a job - just a series of internships and summers full of debate camp or international travel.  Class inequality in this country seems to get more extreme by the day. 

Ace blogger and controversy czarina Penelope Trunk has a lot to say about the questionable value of a college degree, and she suggests scrapping grad school altogether.  See here and here.  I mean, essentially, if we've known for some time that the voice of the American Dream that is telling you that a college degree will get you what you want is often lying, why do we keep listening to it?  She makes me want to start my own online business, and even though I often doubt her sanity I admire her writing ability and unique perspectives.

Elysian fields

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to the Elysian plain…where life is easiest for men. 

No snow is there, nor heavy storm, nor ever rain, 

but ever does Ocean send up blasts of the shrill-blowing West Wind 

that they may give cooling to men.

— Homer, Odyssey

  "In no fix'd place the happy souls reside. In groves we live, and lie on mossy beds, By crystal streams, that murmur thro' the meads: But pass yon easy hill, and thence descend; The path conducts you to your journey's end.” This said, he led them up the mountain's brow, And shews them all the shining fields below. They wind the hill, and thro' the blissful meadows go.
— Virgil, Aeneid

I had a very vivid dream on Friday night that there were buffaloes running fast in fields of flowers along the side of rolling mountains.  As far as the eye could see, there were mountains covered in flowers, with occasional groves of trees.  The buffalo in front of me was in lavender, but there were also white and red flowers in patches nearby.  It was so beautiful and sunny.  I ran behind the buffalo on a flat strip of flower-covered land sticking out from the side of the sloping mountain. It felt so good to run! I felt fantastic, and so happy and light.  I ran faster and faster in the beautiful flowers.  A voice in my head said "Elysian fields," and then the dream ended.

Last night on Sunday I dreamed that someone told me, "Your writing is disconnected from the power source."  I was offended, and then I woke up in pain.

Ironing the rags

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Lately it seems like the past is near.  Like the things that haunted past generations are trying to get their hooks into my own generation, into me.  I act out old patterns without meaning to, think old thoughts as instinct, and what was the past is still right here inside of me.  I am inscribed.

It started with my mother-in-law casually asking me if I packed my husband lunches every day.  That seemed odd and old-fashioned.  Two days ago, I felt my husband was not doing his share of the cleaning in preparation for a visit from out-of-town relatives.  I resented how it seemed to be my role, as the female, to prepare the house and be the hostess. 

Then there was yesterday's dinner with the relatives, an event so filled with heavy statements, lingering ghosts, and clues to the mysteries of my family that today on Good Friday I am still digesting what it all means.


Before people arrived, I cleaned the last things, straightened a pillow, put on the tablecloth.  I spun the patterned plates I inherited from my grandmother as I positioned them before each chair so that the blue carriage scene faced the correct direction.  I cut hyacinths and a daffodil from the front yard and placed them in a vase in the middle of the table.  My aunt and uncle had driven across the country for an Easter visit, so I wanted their first impression of my house to be a good one.

Before my mother and aunt arrived, it was me and the guys - my husband, brother, father, and 84-year-old uncle who hadn't seen me since my wedding.  The first thing my uncle said as I greet him is, "You've gained some weight!  It looks good on you."  It seemed like he expected me to thank him for the assessment of my body shape in front of three other men.  I said, "Okaaaaay . . ." and someone changed the subject as I fumed in silence. Suddenly, my breasts and stomach felt huge and prominent.  I wish I weren't so affected, so upset.  I wish I didn't know I would remember this for a long time.  I wish I didn't monitor my eating so he wouldn't think I eat too much - so he didn't think I deserved this larger body I now have.

I spent the night sucking my stomach in for this asshole who I only see once every few years.  As if that would disguise it - the obvious fact that I have gained a lot of weight, and it's visible and everyone can tell, everyone has known for some time now.  It's not my private secret just because no one else is rude enough to bring it up except my inappropriate 84-year-old uncle.

This rude comment coincided with a rather adult moment - the kind of old-fashioned, classic adult moment that centuries of women have been groomed to orchestrate: I am greeting relatives who have known me since infancy as a grown woman and as a wife, in my own home, as hostess for a meal.  I am proud of my husband and my house, and proud of the woman I have grown up to be.  Look at this happy life I have made for myself.  Look at the flowers from my own yard on the table. 

I stare across the kitchen at my elderly uncle, clutching his glass with two hands so he doesn't drop it, confessing that my aunt no longer trusts him to drive, asking for everything to be repeated because he can't hear.  I've gained weight, but he has new hearing aids.  Time marches on.  It's not worth it to make a scene by expressing my rage.  I am actually the one with power here - youthfulness and health.  I need to let this go.  

When my aunt and mother arrive, my aunt has my dad go re-park my mother's car so it is not so far from the curb.  As her husband follows her sister's orders, my humiliated mother tries to joke that she's being put in her place by her big sister just like the old days.

During the meal, my aunt reveals that in childhood my grandmother made her iron everything, even her father's undershirts, even the rags.  She didn't have to iron her father's underwear, but there was a particular way to fold each one.  After ironing, the rags could be folded and stacked - they wouldn't stack nicely if they had been wrinkled.  When my aunt grew up and got her own house, my grandmother offered to give her some of her rags and was mad when my aunt said that she didn't want my grandmother's rags. Imagine how much my grandma thought of her rags!  My grandmother who survived the Great Depression, who in her rural childhood wore dresses sewn from the fabric of flour sacks and grew up to live in urban Cleveland having these rags, this superfluous fabric, that she made her daughter care for and fold and stack.

My mother and aunt discuss how their childhood church - where they were baptized, went to school, gave confession, got married, and buried their parents - was recently going to be closed but the Vatican is making them re-open it.  They are much relieved that the Vatican has taken this step, despite the Catholic money problems stemming from all of the sexual abuse lawsuits.

I sit next to my mother, our similar soft bellies pressing against the dinner table.  She reminds me to bring an extra hardboiled egg with the deviled eggs I am assigned to bring for Easter dinner in three days.  It's an Eastern European family tradition to cut the egg into pieces and each person eats from the same egg "to keep the family together."  How pagan, I think.  She mentions ham, kielbasa, sweet potatoes for Easter dinner.  Garden of the Gods salad.  Usually there would be fried homemade pierogies, but this year my mother is making a renewed attempt to control her weight.  My brother asks if he's supposed to bring anything and my mother says no.

My aunt explains that when, long ago, my grandmother asked her doctor if she should quit smoking, he told her that it would be bad for her health because it would make her too nervous.  So she kept smoking.  My uncle says that quitting smoking was the hardest thing he ever did and every day he still thinks about smoking.  He talks about the navy.  On the boats, he worked in the laundry.  I don't say this but I think, the navy, that's where you got your tattoo, the tattoo that my grandmother always assumed you were a bad person for having, because people get tattoos in jail.  He asks my husband, "Did you ever smoke?"  In front of my mother, the only right answer to this is no, because in her eyes, only bad people smoke.


My mother expresses shock that my brother never told her he's been going to a physical therapist for weeks.  I mention that that very day, I had done as I was told and called her ten minutes after my doctor's appointment to let her know how it had gone.  My husband says, "Wait, what? You had a doctor's appointment today?" It is probably strange that I agreed to call my mother after my appointment.

I show my aunt and uncle the project I made in a Park and Rec. weaving class I took for eight weeks.  I describe how there were dozens of looms in the basement of an urban elementary school.  They ask if I still have the loom they gave me years ago, plucked out of their many looms and weaving projects and boxes of yarn that crowd their Cleveland living room.  I explain that I took this class so I could learn how to string it up.  "How to sley it," my uncle corrects.  He runs his fingers over the cloth, spreading it out and then re-folding it, examining how the ends are finished and the different patterns in the sampler.  "Houndstooth," we both say.  My aunt says she can't see one mistake in the cloth.  My uncle tells me it is very well-done, and I believe him.

Part of me wants to tell my mother what my uncle said to me about my weight, because I know she will understand precisely how it made me feel and we will gasp together in catharsis and validate each other's appalled reactions.  But I will not bring it up because I know it will actually hurt her to hear.  She will hate him.  And she has to serve him an eight-course Easter dinner in three days and share the hardboiled egg pieces with him and care for him as he sleeps in her house with his hidden tattoo. I look more like her every day, the shape of my body changing to match the round, comforting shapes of her body.

I hear her tell my husband as she's putting on her coat, "My mother would have loved you.  I so wish you could have met her."  Just before the group heads out the door, my aunt and mother are reminiscing about how their mother was so strict and about all of the Catholic school they went to, and my mom says, "People wonder why I never acted out or had a rebellious phase. I never had the slightest chance!"  But I know her too well.  I know she rebelled by eating what she wanted and savoring it.  By getting a doctorate and being more successful than anyone thought she would be.  By taking up space.

 

Coming up through the cracks

From a long interview with the nonfiction writer John McPhee in The Paris Review by Peter Hessler, in answer to the question, "Are you concerned about outlets for writers dying out?"

But it’s just unimaginable to me that writing itself would die out. OK, so where is it going to go? It’s a fluid force: it’ll come up through cracks, it’ll go around corners, it’ll pour down from the ceiling. 

I love this view of writing as an unstoppable amoebic force, like The Blob.  Even though the publishing industry is undergoing huge changes and neighborhood bookstores are few and far between, writing will prevail.  I believe blogging is a great example of what he describes.  This is me coming up through the cracks.