American Girls

(hilarious) Image courtesy of bibbitybobbityboo.tumblr.com (soooo beautiful)

In response to my burning desire to stop being a consumer, I actually stopped myself from buying a measly £2 whopping £2 cup of Starbucks coffee when I was in the city for a conference last week. I'm taking this all very seriously.

As a matter of fact, on Sunday I splurged and bought not one but two coffees (one I shared) and wound up spilling my own all over the pavement. I think it was karmic retribution. Maybe it was trying to put mittens on while balancing two cups of coffee? I guess we'll never know.

Anyway, I finished Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann last night and just loved it. It was sad and all the things you certainly don't want to read about right before bed, but some of the messages were so beautifully written; so poignant and true for so many of us. Here are a few that stood out...

Being in love is like leaning on a broken reed. It is to be precariously balanced, to teeter between the vertical and the horizontal. It's like war, it's to demand of one's sensibilities the impossible-- to expect paranoia to coexist with faith, chance with design, to enlist suspicion insensibly in certain regards and suppress it blindly in others.

page 288

Lately I've been thinking of Cuba. I imagine it to be the last original place. All you ever hear of Cuba is, There is no freedom there! Television is state-controlled! Yet for all the supposed freedom in America, there is a confounding deficit of ingenuity in terms of thought and taste. Style is dictated by the controlling influences and concerns of a mass marketplace. People are trained to be dutiful consumers-- we all want the same stuff, not because it's good or convinced that we can't live without it. We forgo all logic of quality and durability.

page 367

It makes me think of how lucky I was to meet Maman when I was a girl. How auspicious for a woman with an abundance of resources to come upon a child with a surplus of lack.

page 507

Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing.

William Shakespeare page 541

Being Jack's friends, you are probably resistant to simplistic analogies. However, I beg you to indulge me. If one is a gardener, one cannot treat a rose as one would any other flower. A rose wants coddling, and to be sure, few people have the patience for it-- so much of the product, so much of the time, is a wall of thorns. Why does God give us the rose? To humble us, to better us, to encourage forgiveness and understanding. And for those who show forbearance, the reward is divine. Yet it occurs to me that the rose is not only the reward, but the acknowledgment of the success of our efforts-- the sensitivity, the tenacity. It is the proof of the virtue of faith. The rose singles out the tender. God has strategically placed the pure in the midst of the perilous to separate out those who can and will strive to reach for an ideal. My suspicion is that once you have been called upon to love this way, once you have proved you capacity, you will be called upon again."

page 571