On Vegemite Sandwiches (among other things)

One of my favorite things about Australia is the bread. Unlike bread here in the US, Australian bread is substantial and unsweet, making it the perfect vehicle for Vegemite. Every time I leave Australia, I miss those Vegemite sandwiches almost as much as I miss my family. That’s actually the case for a lot of seemingly mundane things that I leave behind there. Every day-to-day experience there has formed itself into this experience that, unfortunately, is all too impermanent.

Ten blocks down from my grandma’s apartment, there is a beach. Almost nobody goes there during the winter while we’re there, but I make a point to swim in the ocean at least once, regardless of how cold it is. Two American summers ago, a king tide took away all of the sand from the beach, leaving nothing but spiky rocks and rough waves. I didn’t get to swim in the ocean that time. What that made me realize is just how impermanent everything is. My childhood beach, something I took as a given was stripped of sand and fun. Last summer, the sand was back. The first thing I did after getting off the plane was sit in the shallow cove and let the waves wash over me and take all the jet lag away.

One of my favorite smells is this laundry detergent from Aldi’s in Australia. It’s really not all that different from what we have in the US, but that smell seems to be woven into all of my memories of my time there. I make a point to do one last load of laundry before I leave Australia every time so that I can at least keep some of the memories alive longer.

What makes a style timeless?

Credit to Igor Flek on UnSplash

For the most part, our fashion trends have come and gone with the decades. Things like go-go boots, poodle skirts, and the massive shoulder pads of the 1980s have all had their time and subsequently been replaced. I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about these types of fast-moving fashion trends and styles, but not a particularly long time focusing on slow and nearly stagnant styles. Earlier this year in December of 2023, I wrote a blog post on the seeming immortality of Converse shoes. However, this example is the only one of me discussing the lingering of a historical fashion item. Today, I would like to talk about the overall idea of timelessness, and what makes something immortal in the fashion world

The first aspect of what makes something a timeless fashion is neutrality of color. Anything that can be combined with newer and faster-moving trends is something more likely to stick around. Some examples of this include the little black dress and the white button-down, which can be mixed and matched with moving trends. As opposed to a specific color trend, such as neons, neutral clothing items do not require an outfit to be procured around them. To make something timeless, it must be neutral and therefore adaptable.

Another aspect of timelessness is the ability to be applied to various aesthetics. Converse, as I mentioned in my previous blog post linked above, are certainly an item I’d consider to have withstood the test of constantly shifting trends. This is nearly exclusively due to their utility for various subcultures, which tend to have their own visual brand. Basketball players, people in the punk scene, and now a good portion of the young population have given Converse a space in their closets for over 100 years. Like the aspect of color on timelessness, the idea of adaptability drives the ability to blend in with new aesthetics and uses.

Not all of our fashion changes. Time and time again, we return to the same few things that provide a base for the rest of the fast-moving fashion world, and adaptability wins again.

The aesthetic of rain

Credit to Danielle Dolson

Today, it is raining. Gone are the 60 degree and sunny days of earlier this week, but replacing them is weather that allows us (even encourages us) to take a break and observe the world. Sunny days seem like the kind of weather in which one must be doing something to enjoy it. Rainy days, on the other hand, trap us inside, forcing us to be slow. Rainy days feel like a cozy kind of sadness that encourages us to approach the day unhurriedly. Curtains of rain feel like they isolate everyone, making us contend with the idea of being at peace with ourselves.

In nearly all types of media, rain has a set number of connotations attached to it. Rain, to me, is the weather of introspection, both in the context of fiction and reality. Countless pieces of media have used rain as a plot tool, either as a catalyst for romantic stories or as a background for a sad event. Yet other media, such as Studio Ghibli pieces, creates a more cozy connotation of rain. As you, the audience, may already be thinking, perhaps there is a cultural and geographic component to this. In places such as Japan and the UK where rain is a more constant state of the outdoors, rain may have less of a sad connotation merely for the reason that it is so commonplace. Conversely, media from areas with minimal rainfall may view rain as a more obviously positive thing; an example of this is seen in the Bollywood film Lagaan in which a drought has devastated the crops. Perhaps the media connotation of rain reflects the relative frequency or rarity of it. Like all fictional plot tools and tropes, there are many aspects to rain and how we use it to convey our stories.

Senior year, fictional edition, part 2

A few months back, I wrote a blog post lamenting the fact that my senior year, and I’m guessing a vast majority of other people’s, was thoroughly not living up to High School Musical standards. Today, there are exactly 32 school days until graduation, and truthfully, this year has become no more Disney-fied than it was back in November when I made the original post. Quite frankly, this entire “piggybacking on an old post” is an admittedly lazy way for me to reach the three-post requirement for this week (senioritis has really kicked in). However, in an attempt to make the most of the last month and a half of high school, here are two things that I’ve done:

• Now that the weather has finally been consistently above sixty degrees, I’ve taken to spending lunch outside again. My favorite type of weather is warm and sunny, which has been absolutely perfect for this week. Something about sitting under a tree and eating lunch with friends feels more like a break than being stuck inside, and it’s been great.
• In the same vein as the first thing, doing my homework outside on sunny days has kept me so much more motivated. After a long winter, doing homework made everything feel even colder and grayer. Now that I have the freedom to sit in the sun doing Spanish homework, the prospect of schoolwork isn’t as terrible.

Overall, I’m incredibly ready to be done with high school. I love the people here, but it’s been a long year of pretty limited free time that I’m excited to get back. I hope you all are also having a good end to your senior year.

A history of hair tools

Credit to Adam Winger on UnSplash

Out of all the categories of humanity’s inventions, that of hair tools is perhaps one of the most complex. From caveman haircuts to the wigs of 1700s France to the electrified curling irons of today, we’ve gone through a lot of shifts in how we style our hair. Here are just some snippets of that history.

Archaeologists have yet to discover evidence of when exactly we started cutting our hair, but a popular hypothesis is that hair cutting simply started when we developed sharp tools, around 2.6 million years ago. Of course, the scissors that would become the prototype for the shears we use today were invented much later; they came to be around 3000-4000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia.

One of the oldest tools that we still have today is the hair comb, which is said to be modeled after the human hand. The earliest surviving comb discovered by archaeologists is from ancient Egypt and Sudan, around the years 3500-3032 BCE. Combs in Ancient Rome around the years 250-400 CE had a double-sided design with one wide-toothed side and one fine-toothed. Throughout history, combs have been made of many materials, including tortoiseshell, wood, metal, and of course, the plastic of today.

Another seemingly ubiquitous tool in the world of hairstyling is the hair dryer. In 1888, Alexandre Godefroy developed the first commercial hairdryer. The first hairdryer was not a small handheld one, more similar to one with a vented hood you would see at a hair salon. Eventually, the handheld hairdryer we see today was invented in 1920, bringing hair dryers into the home for the first time, although the early ones were heavy and sometimes electrically dangerous. By 1950, hairdryers began to be made of plastic, giving people even more accessibility to them in their homes.

The final big category of hair tools are hot tools. Hot tools started off as metal objects, often combs or rollers, that were heated over a fire and applied to the hair. As our infrastructure became electrified, so did our hot tools. In 1938, Solomon Harper invented electrically heated hot rollers. The first two-tonged hair straightener was invented in 1909 in France, but did not catch on until the latter end of the 20th century.

A history of academic regalia

Credit to Leon Wu on UnSplash

Unless this blog for some reason becomes read outside of AP Lang, most of you reading this will be graduating in just under two months from now. This week, the senior class of 2024 gets their caps and gowns, signifying just how close graduation is. But why do we wear these things? From an out of context standpoint, caps and gowns seem rather odd in the grand scheme of our fashion. As most odd things do, this graduation tradition has roots steeped in history.

The traditional cap and gown is thought by historians to have started in the 12th and 13th centuries when scholars wore long clerical gowns to both symbolize their status and serve the practical purpose of keeping them warm in an era before modern insulation and heating. Caps, too, originated as a practical way of preserving body heat in the cold school buildings. Initially, caps were hoods rather than hats. Over time, these hoods morphed into skull caps and then into the traditional mortarboard hats in the 1700s.

Despite the fact that scholars eventually began to wear more traditional clothing in their everyday studies, caps and gowns stuck around as an academic tradition. Today, scholars decorate their caps to reflect their personalities, and there is a wide range of gown styles based on various degrees. According to Carnegie Mellon University, undergraduate regalia consists of a usually black hoodless gown fitted with bell sleeves and a red tassel on the cap. The gown of a master’s degree recipient is adorned with a colored hood and sleeves with odd, arc-shaped cutouts with a black tassel on the cap. A doctoral degree gown is perhaps the most extravagant; PhD regalia is a gown with velvet facing on the front and three velvet stripes on each sleeve with a gold tassel on the cap.

Most of the fashion I talk about on this blog is very subject to change; this is not the case with graduation traditions. Caps and gowns started much as they are today, and will stay relevant for centuries to come.

Why impermanence creates nostalgia

Credit to Jon Tyson on Unsplash

When I was 13, I had what you would call a “middle school relationship”. Like all relationships then, we were very cat-and-mouse; just about any miniscule amount of drama or doubt caused a breakup, but we found ourselves back together two weeks later. We dated and broke up a total of four times over the course of a year and a half for various reasons, some legitimate and some incredibly petty. Despite all of this drama and heartbreak, I sometimes find myself wondering what would have happened had we somehow stayed together. As with all nostalgia, I see the experience through a rose-colored glass. Memories of awkwardly holding hands during an assembly in the auditorium, of trading sweaters and bracelets, of watching the clouds while we talked on a grassy hill take precedence over any negative ones. She and I are still very close friends, but our lives have drifted so differently since eighth grade that the ship has long sailed.

More than anything, the fact that this is all over is what gives it the rosy perspective. Nostalgia, by definition, can only be felt when the experience being subjected to it is over. It is because our relationship was only a fleeting part of my life that I see it in a positive light; the impermanence of it gives way to nostalgia. This is such a common experience that psychology has a name for it. “Rosy Retrospection” happens when we think about past events, especially distant ones, in a more abstract way. Because of this, many negative details get left out of the equation. The past isn’t necessarily better than the present; it is simply not with us.

A history of pixie cuts

Credit to InStyle

In recent years, short hairstyles have come to be accepted as less of a traditionally masculine fashion choice. Although these hairstyles still have many masculine social connotations, short hair is no longer considered as belonging to one gender. How, exactly, did we get here?

Pixie cuts, as we think of them today, have existed since the 17th century. According to Vogue, the first recorded instance of short hair on women as a fashion statement in Western nations was in 1800s France. This style, dubbed the Titus haircut, is said to be modeled after how hair was cut prior to guillotine execution. 1800s France was a dark place.

Although the flapper bob was a very popular fashion statement in the 1920s, it isn’t quite short enough to be a pixie cut. The pixie cut most similar to those we have today was made popular in the 1950s and 1960s by actresses such as Audrey Hepburn in the movie Roman Holiday and Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. In the 1960s especially, many chose to take the plunge and get a pixie due to its presence in pop culture at the time.

Despite the pixie cut’s history of being a feminist statement, it fell out of fashion in the social justice-focused 1970s. As aspects of hippie culture entered the mainstream, long hair began to be favored. This trend continued through the 1980s with its myriad of teased ponytails and hairspray. It wasn’t until the 1990s that celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Halle Berry debuted their own pixies on the red carpet, marking a distinct shift towards a more minimalist aesthetic, as compared to the past two decades. These pixie cuts were notably shorter and more “DIY” looking as opposed to the more styled look of the 1960s.

Today, pixie cuts encompass a wide range of styles. From buzzcuts to longer and more voluminous cuts, the pixie cut has certainly made a comeback in many ways. I hope it sticks around.

The archetype of the soulmate

Warning: spoilers for One Day at a Time and The Good Place

Credit to Roberto Nickson on Unsplash

Soulmates, other halves, missing pieces, twin flames. Whatever you want to call them, the idea of having a person made for you by some higher power has quite literally been around since antiquity. The idea has been attributed to Plato in his 385 BCE Symposium, where he writes of a jealous Zeus splitting four-armed and four-legged humans apart to direct their power into searching for their literal other half. However, the term “soulmate” was not coined until the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote it in an 1822 letter. Today, it is approximated that around 63% of Americans believe in soulmates, with other surveys concluding that the proportion is higher. Unsurprisingly, the belief in soulmates has embedded itself into a vast majority of the media we consume. Bridgerton, Friends, The Office, and countless others are entrenched in the trope of characters “finding their other halves”. Of course, the characters will eventually end up with their predetermined match as a significant part of their respective genres, and audiences come to expect this.

Despite the large amount of media that does portray the stereotypical “other half” view of soulmates, there is a growing number of writers that choose to reject that view either partially or in its entirety. In one of my all-time favorite shows, One Day at a Time, Elena poses the idea that she could call her partner, Syd, her “other whole”. While this piece of dialogue was written mostly for the purpose of humor, the secondary message that Elena and Syd were whole people before they met is clear. On Michael Schur’s The Good Place, it is revealed by Michael, somewhat a holder of universal truth, that soulmates are not people predestined to be together, but people who make a conscious effort to do so. This more progressive and free-will centered view is certainly in line with younger generations’ ideas of soulmates and relationships in general. The long-held idea that soulmates are inherently romantic is fading in favor of their potential to exist in any kind of relationship, whether that be platonic or romantic. This newer viewpoint also allows for people to not disavow their past relationships as “not real love” and to be able to value impermanence. Overall, the idea of the soulmate isn’t disappearing anytime soon, but it certainly will change.

I love y’all’s blogs

If you haven’t already seen it, the list of 2023-24 blogs is available on the AP Lang WordPress. I’ve gone and read a lot of them, and I absolutely love the posts on them. I really appreciate the new sort of honesty, it sort of breaks the illusion that everyone has their lives together and somehow knows how to do everything. I’ve struggled for a long time with seeing myself as somehow worse than others, so I am eternally grateful that we have the opportunity to share the universal struggles that don’t really get talked about. Alright, that’s it. Hope you have a good day 🙂