Ceci n'est pas une pipe dream.: October 2009

Cintra Wilson, one of the New York Times Styles Section's dastardly critical shoppers, got mega called out for being a snotty, fat-shaming harpy as a result of her review of J.C. Penney a few weeks ago. I do have a sentimental attachment to that particular department store, especially the location within walking distance from my Raleigh home, from whence all my clothes came until I was about 11 and rebelled (and even after that, a good percentage still did -- remember the frustration of combing through the clearance racks in high school, Alex, trying to find the one lone garment that was cheap enough to purchase and also not hideous?) But last Thursday, Wilson took on Ann Taylor, and I found parts of the article a lot more wounding than anything from her diatribe against dowdy suburbanites -- despite the fact that her overall review is positive:

"My shorthand for the look was always 'capitalist burqa' or 'corporate office submissive': cubicle-wear of so-so quality for the single girl in her late 20s whose self-esteem has been almost beaten to death by the beauty industrial complex and whose decent education has been punished with a thanklessly demanding office job. She’s a can-do Cinderella who has always had to change the oil in her own pumpkin and is too overworked to have a healthy social life outside the workplace. Her outfits must therefore be corporate-respectable, yet body-conscious enough to attract a nice tax attorney husband."

What I'm saying is I broke down during the first week of my job and purchased a garment from Ann Taylor -- a green short-sleeve sweater on sale for $9.99. It's become the opposite of a good-luck outfit or talismanic accessory. I wear it a lot but but always feel vaguely defeated.

Then, today, I ended up reading "Goodbye to All That," sort of by accident. I was taking a break from another pilgrimage to adulthood: walking the three miles from my workplace to the car dealership where I was to pick up the new used vehicle I bought two days ago. This trek happened to involve a stretch of the Baltimore Pike I walked many times in college, although the chain stores are a little different than they were when I graduated in 2007 (I still can't believe the Baja Fresh shut down, or that the supermarket now has a Starbucks inside it). So I went to Borders to read trashy mags, as I was wont to do in college, with girlfriends or sometimes alone.

I got bored of the mags and pulled out a borrowed copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which has been my public transport reading for a while now. I was finally to the last essay, which is of course "Goodbye to All That." Joan Didion is obviously no corporate submissive, but it seems the same tragedy befalls confessional essayists and office drones alike:

"That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things in fact are irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it."

After that I walked the rest of the way to the dealership (next to the Babies-R-Us, across from the Kohl's), thinking about how my friends can be roughly separated into those who think about The Future and those who won't or don't or can't yet. I finished signing all the paperwork with a woman named Cheryl whose cell phone kept bursting into the chorus of "Single Ladies." She got the mechanic to take my ugly little economy car to the gas station so I'd have a full tank. I drove back down the Pike and almost took a familiar left turn, with the intention of spending the rest of my remaining free time in the college library, where I have alumni borrowing privileges and still know the guest password for the computers. But I didn't want to go in my office clothes, so I just went back to work.