even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

doesn't it seem in america like most ppl you meet want to be seen as younger than they are? it's always a big topic of conversation at the bar - ppl discussing how young bartenders have thought them in the past, whether they'd still be confused as looking that age, etc. has it always been this way or is this part of the same phenomenon? fwiw i've always wanted to look older and i'm thrilled that i'm starting to go grey. i think grey hair is gonna be ballin.

i don't know, something about this feels just completely subjective. my brother is 2 years older than me. my whole life he has been older than me. 2 years seemed like a lot when you're a kid or a teenager. i look at photo of him at 19 and he STILL seems older than me, partly because it is so vividly present to me what i felt like when i was 17 and he was 19. i'm the "more adult" one now by society's measure, having completed grad school and married and with a kid. but he'll always feel older than me.

clothing styles have obviously gotten more casual, for sure. so if i see a photo of my grandma at age 25, she's gonna look older because she's wearing older fashions. but i have a photo of my grandma at age 25 wearing work pants and a white undershirt, and that casual outfit really helped dispel my subjective feeling that he looks older in that photo than he actually does.

also, there is a class thing going on when you talk about how "men were adults back in the day" and "gravitas" and shit when you look at a photo of madison avenue in the 50s and everyone is wearing a suit and tie and a hat. these are white men working in new york city. not everybody dressed that way in the 50s.

getting carded for cigarettes in my early 40's just seemed sad for some reason... no gravitas!

The older I get, the worse I become at guessing the age of others.

lots of people wore suits in the 50's!

x-post

or all kinds of people of all classes got dressed up more often anyway. wasn't just a white dude in new york thing.

disclaimer: i only know stuff from pictures and movies.

in watching the roosevelts last night on pbs i was regularly struck by how a 24 year old teddy roosevelt looked much older than me
and how basically everyone looked about thirty years older than they actually were

lol i watch pbs

i didn't actually read the whole new york times thing though. i got the point fairly early on. sick of mad men sociology in general.

I think it's not just that people got "dressed up" more often, but that there was really nothing like the modern conception of casual clothing -- no equivalent of just going out in an ill-fitting t-shirt and some cargo shorts.

sick of mad men sociology in general.
this x 1000

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/ww2_8/w30_1a34948u.jpg

http://photographyinamerica.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/color016-sjpg_950_2000_0_75_0_50_50.jpg

http://denverpost.slideshowpro.com/albums/001/496/album-125171/cache/color001.sJPG_950_2000_0_75_0_50_50.sJPG?1410791135

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2010/07/26/captured-america-in-color-from-1939-1943/2363/

another disclaimer: i come from a long line of white guys in suits.

My dad has pics of himself and his fellow Air Force dudes working on dirt bikes in a workshop in the late '60s. Even though they're in Okinawa during wartime AND they're tinkering around greasy engines, they're all dressed in clean & ironed broadcloth shirts and Stay-Prest trousers. It's a little nuts, frankly.

speaking of teddy roosevelt, here's a nice picture of my other grandfather and his brother playing catch with teddy's pal john burroughs.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/1532150_10153687411685298_918354684_n.jpg?oh=f816d664efb211376b50099f3fb5aede&oe=54879FE3&__gda__=1422530233_c371adfda73cff5f0f3aa4d0f6ed3dd1

sorry if i'm ruining this thread. i just don't feel like doing ebay right now...

Grandfather and brother ages four and six, respectively.

good stuff afaiac

roosevelts is pretty fucking good btw!

I'm p sure the local Japanese laborers did their laundry and actually pressed all those shirts--a bunch of working class 20-year-old draftees were not ironing their own shit.

xp No, yr pics are awesome! I wish I had ones of my fam to share but I don't hold any of those historical items, they're all at the homestead in boxes somewhere.

i mean it is definitely true that people often dressed more formally and as hurting said didn't have a concept of "casual clothing" that matches what we today understand to be casual clothing. it is also true that life was shorter and harder and more was often demanded of people earlier in their lives than is the case now. but what really is an "adult"? can we be sure that people back in the day didn't similarly feel like they were frauds at being "grown-ups" even though they had tons of adult responsibilities? how many people actually feel like "yes i'm an adult now, i have a house and car and i feel all grown up?" it's a pretty fast fucking transition from childhood to adolescence to your 20s and thirties. i don't even really know what i'm arguing but the claim that "there are no adults anymore" and "back in the day there was" just seems partially mythmaking about "men and women back in the day"

The difference between blue collar and white collar jobs used to be much more pronounced than it is at present. Farmers and miners and other manual laborers aged damned fast, and 'housewives' were all manual laborers in the era before the washing machine and other appliances. Other big factors in old people looking younger than ever are better hygiene, better diet, vaccines, and antibiotics.

Also not smoking two packs a day.

The people I know who I perceive as looking "old" for their age tend always have massively stressful lives. I saw this a lot doing check-ins for a rehab clinic; you'd have people in their early 30's who looked like they were pushing 70. I think our current doughiness and general boyish good looks derive from having jobs that are just slightly better than shoveling uranium dust under a blazing sun for 16 hours a day, and not finishing our day off with a bottle of ersatz whiskey and sawdust covered toast like our forebears.

That said, I do think the workplace is an interesting area regarding notions of adulthood. I am 29, working an office job at a large university, but still feel like I am in some sort of liminal stage of career development, largely because I work with a group of mostly 50+ folks who have very low computer skills. Doing something like hitting "CTRL+ALT+DEL" and shutting down a process that's freezing their computer is tantamount to delivering emergency surgery in an elevator with a pen knife. Email conversations take days, not minutes, rudimentary things like returning calls gets stretched out over 8 hours. It all seems so inefficient. That lack of efficiency seems to drive a lot of workplace ennui, at least for folks that I remain in contact with. This leads to the lack of workplace loyalty, the lack of pride in work, and the complete dissolution of identifying who you "are" with what you "do".

xp fwiw I think it's pretty common for military to iron their own uniforms/clothing and for it even to be part of training

i just feel kinda shabby. i wish i knew how to wear a hat. to be fair to myself though, i'm kind of a slob and also lazy. i like this new syndrome i just learned about. i'm gonna say that i have it to get out of doing things i don't want to do:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

The most effective technique to overcome impostor syndrome is to simply recognize that it exists.[citation needed]

Also sunscreen xp

speaking of mad men, this is totally my favorite nyt story of the year. sign me up!

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/opinion/sunday/should-we-all-take-a-bit-of-lithium.html

definitely gonna be drinking more tap water anyway...

good news for us, scott:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22mad%20men%20era%22

the mad men era era is over

xp don't forget the neti pot!

okay, three more pictures and i swear that's it. actual 1950's mad men advertising art that my mother did:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/600754_10151629322712137_1885322127_n.jpg?oh=74d8ff4c5eac39eb5feb6bff7cee2ba5&oe=548C069E&__gda__=1418635285_e004370ca3bd1686e73035618bd40b01

https://scontent-a-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/v/t1.0-9/554845_10151629322937137_752728477_n.jpg?oh=4e08c141705d2a57c5d45202822604a4&oe=54904DC8

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/v/t1.0-9/532766_10151629323092137_975069566_n.jpg?oh=8220bb770494c09cc0da5df01a7e48fd&oe=54C79AB8&__gda__=1418291986_eb646fea678d4aaeac3c216478784780

A STRIKE FOR SPRIGGS

I love that post, Ryan.

what's the opposite of quid/agg?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/business/student-loan-debt-burdens-more-than-just-young-people.html

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/trend-piece

kudos

they should do this for everything.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/pass-the-word-the-phone-call-is-back

xp two more examples from language log:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=14744

are home renovations writers becoming blogger burnouts? the answer may surprise you! or you may not give a fuck!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/garden/when-blogging-becomes-a-slog.html

haha was reading that while waiting for my bodega pancakes this morning and thinking "if i had brought my phone, i'd be linking this on quid/ag, but if i'd brought my phone, i probably would not have bought the paper to pass the time waiting for my pancakes"