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• Monday, January 23, 2006 07:33 PM

  now I know

  ...who to blame for that abominable flip-flop trend on the campus where I work, like I want to look at grotty adolescent male feet while I'm waiting for my sandwich at Panera. And those horrible jeans that DON'T FIT, and the shirts that are supposed to look cool but just scream "suburban mall rat" and communicate to their professors that they're just there for the grade, and don't make them think or do math because they've got a night of hard partying ahead. Milling around on campus, screaming themselves hoarse outside the bars on Friday nights, what the vast majority of them don't seem to understand is that they're headed for a life of invisibility. They won't be the kids who go far, both in and out of academia. Do you think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would have worn Abercrombie and Fitch? Maybe, but I doubt it.

  And Jeffries--himself probably once a skinny kid who got his head dunked in the toilet one too many times for walking funny--may be making up for lost time, but he's probably also laughing all the way to the bank, marketing a delusion of coolness that'll tide these poor tykes over until hard reality socks them in the face and they wake up to a faux-Anglophile vinyl-sided development with a minivan and a pointless paper-shuffling job and three screaming brats of their own.

  —Marianna Trench Read Marianna Trench's other letters
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