Underemployed and begging to differ

"Job Climate for the Class of 2008 Is a Bit Warmer Than Expected"

So writes the NYTimes today, as I spend my entire day scouring the internet for jobs that are more and more outside the realm of ideal.

Walking from the graduation ceremony, I heard one of my classmates fathers giving her a hard time about not having a job. "Dad, lots of people don't have jobs."

I felt bad, I knew how she felt. "I don't have a job yet," I told her so her dad could hear. "Me neither," chimed in two friends I was standing with. "See?" she snapped at him and we all felt better for a moment.

The first week post-graduation feels like a breakup. The sort where you still love each other but its best for you both if you move on. Somehow though, I feel like Vassar is not lamenting the way I am.

It's fitting then, that job searching is eerily similar to firing up match.com. You adjust your personality to fit the person on the other end (or the business, as it were), you act overly enthused about things you know next to nothing about, you agree to eat at a thai restaurant when you hate it (here think: entertaining the possibility of moving 500 miles away or lowering your pay standards $10,000).

"The graduates who are struggling to find work now typically earned degrees from less prestigious institutions and were not the top students.

'A poor economy magnifies the differences between student groups,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “Those graduating from spectacular schools with spectacular grades will continue to do well, while those in the middle and lower end will have a much harder time finding jobs and will be offered much lower salaries.' "

Hrmm... if you say so...

Rachel Ray's hipster (keffiyeh?) scarf

Exhibit A: A still photo of Rachael Ray, taken from a recent Dunkin' Donuts Commercial. It looks as though she's about to object to something, or defend herself about something, doesn't it?

Dunkin' Donuts had to defend itself yesterday, taking this spot off the air. Why? Ray's scarf.

Now, if you're a Vassarian, I know what you are thinking about that scarf:

"That looks like that hipster scarf that I always

see _____ wearing when they sit smoking outside the library..."

I think for many, now, that is one of the primary associations for the scarf, also known as a keffiyeh. Traditionally, the keffiyeh is a headdress worn by Arab men. Right-wing conservatives were quick to point out that the scarf is a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, popularized by Yasser Arafat.

Pro-Jewish blogger Pam Geller wildly called the scarf "part of a cultural jihad."

I wonder how many 20-somethings wearing the scarf on a daily basis at liberal arts colleges and in neighborhoods in Brooklyn (with large jewish populations no less) actually realize any authentic symbolism tied to the piece of

cloth.

You'll see on the left, that even Newsweek's magazine Current includes the keffiyeh as one of the essential accessories to hipsterdom, as a sidebar to Molly Finkelstein's article on the subject.

The entire situation lead me to think about where we draw the line between fashion and the symbolic. Incorporating a piece of cloth with symbolic meanings in Palestine and voiding it of its symbolic significance - or at least rending its significance irrelevant to the modster wearers - is an unsurprising move for our generation.

Post-modernism (yes, I'm sorry, I'm going to bring in the P word...) allows gen. Y to effectively ignore symbolic ties to previous eras: a scarf can be propaganda and fashion, or neither, or one, at any time.

We get away with a lot under the guise of irony and mimicry. There are lines we draw, parameters we do not cross, though they are becoming fuzzied. On MTV's reality show The Paper, which we Misc-ers watch with pitiful relish, one of the students was wearing an Israeli Defense Force t-shirt, one I've seen VC students wear on occasion as well. Che Guevera t-shirts are more ubiquitous than Chuck Taylors.

I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong here, but I think it is true that we often do not give enough consideration to what we're wearing and why.

It's possible that's what upset some about Ray's scarf, they wish she would just think (or that her stylist would think for her). Wear what you want, but wear it with some sort of consciousness? Maybe that's the moral.