assorted frivolities

1. Visited the senior Archers this past weekend. Latest notes on the wedding industrial complex: Mama Archer tells me of her struggles to find an appropriate mother of the bride dress. "They all look... very Spanish Inquisition," she told me. "I feel like I'm dressed like a person in one of those Spanish paintings that I looked at in art history classes in college. It's like, here's me in my Spanish Inquisition outfit, here's Torquemada, there's the dead Jew." Pause. "You probably shouldn't quote this out of context. I might be misunderstood. I really wanted to say this to the salesclerks, too, but I'm sure that they' might have been insulted. Also, that they might not have understood." Relatedly, sometimes I suspect that my neuroses are not my fault.

2. Due to weight fluctuations (of the good kind), suddenly I can fit comfortably into a lot of wool skirts that I purchased c. 2004 and perhaps not much else. I apparently did not believe in buying clothes that were not wool skirts to be worn with tall boots back in 2004. While this development is flattering to my vanity, wool skirts were infinitely more useful in, like, Hanover six years ago than they are in D.C. in May. Still, I fear that this moment is likely to pass, and that I need to wear all of the wool skirts this week before it flees again. Except that the air conditioner in my office is not really functioning, which makes this plan even less practical that it sounded in the abstract. Oh well.

3. Should law schools give away the first year? Or, perhaps more precisely, let people walk away after 1L cost free, but charge them heftier prices over the second and third years? It's an interesting idea. It certainly would make attending a lower ranked school more attractive than it currently is -- if you do well and/or find something non-competitive you like, you can stick around. If you don't, you're essentially out only your opportunity cost for a year of not working. But at least you're not deeply in debt from the year.

4. Daria is on box DVD! (via) This is incredibly exciting, and I confess to being extravagant and shelling out $44 for a used copy on Amazon immediately. I fear my Pnin has not been introduced, and that he might need to be.

He had me at "abolish the Bluebook."

No, I've never noticed any nefarious dating market conspiracy against high achieving women either. True, I am probably vastly dumber than de Beauvoir, Arendt, or even Kagan, and most of my relevant anecdotal evidence concerns women who are high achieving in a more ordinary sense of the word. And yes, I found middle and high school painful in that regard. But the real issue there was that "high-achieving" meant "different", and different meant dating was difficult. But there were all sorts of other ways of being different in high school that made life difficult, and high achieving probably wasn't necessarily the worst sort of different.

I also find it weird that the Roissy types so often claim that there's some vast supply of working class, non-ambitious women out there who are vastly more attractive than their high achieving sisters. As far as I'm able to tell, the three big constraints on female attractiveness are genetics (being blessed with nice bone structure and so forth), money , and time. The first seems randomly distributed across all levels of female achievement. While there are high achieving status income disequilibrium babies who lack the second (writers, art historians, non-profit leaders and so on), even they usually wind up fairly well off eventually. It's much easier to eat healthfully, buy flattering clothes, and so forth if one has money than if one doesn't.* I suppose high achieving women do lag as a group on the third: needing to devote time to school and work necessarily means less time spent on one's looks. But... one can balance out vulnerability on #3 via consumption along dimension #2, which suggests that not all is bleak for the ambitious among us.

Note also that any discussion of Kagan groupies or lack thereof should include a nod to this Craigslist ad.


*This may be another example of libertarian tendencies coming to the fore, but in my admittedly anecdotal experience, expensive goods and services usually are better in some way than their lower priced equivalents. That is, expensive dresses do not exist merely because the rich are evil and want to flaunt their wealth conspicuously over everyone else.