Measuring Ourselves by Cupcakes

I actually said it and I heard the ... can you turn 'appalled' into a noun? Appallation? I guess not. There's appellation. And Appalachian. But I doubt anyone would mess with the mix and sneak in an 'appallation.'

Well. I was appalled and I heard it in my voice when I said: No, no no. I'm old school. I said it about cupcakes. Cupcakes.

I'd had one too many tony little boutiques and their pretty little cakes in pleated paper skirts, frosting spun into a hats, as if everyone's on their way to Ascot. Forced by cupcakes with suspiciously unnecessary ingredients and names that would make the folks who name lipsticks spin in their graves (I say this because no one has advanced the art of ridiculous products names like the lipstick folks who just can't leave 'nude' alone. I've been irritable ever since I lost my perfect Molton Brown color in a very unnecessary name changing spree.)

Anyway. Old school. About cupcakes. I suspect this will go down in my personal history as a very very low point - not so much that I said it, but that I had to say it. I had to say it in order to preserve something remotely like integrity.

I love cupcakes and always have. My family were bootleggers and bakers, which, for some reason, makes me believe that the fondness-for-cake thing is hereditary. Any excuse will do. I also love powdered sugar donuts. I can take or leave chocolate. (Well, with the exception of the previously mentioned Milk Duds.) But please. PLEASE. When cupcakes become the darling of the social scene?

Someone, somewhere, ought to be embarrassed. It's like we handed over our popular tastes to a sorority, and one whose signal talent runs to vacancy of taste and a love of saccharine.

I should have been prepared. I saw hints of it on the internet. Forum conversations, whole threads dedicated to cupcakes and the written squeals, as if vacuous Valley Girls were let loose on keyboards, competing to see who loved cupcakes more.

Here’s a helpful hint: you don't love cupcakes more than anyone else. Trust me. (Well, assuming we’re not talking about the people who just plain old don’t like cakes.) A cupcake is not a novel idea. You don’t really belong to any select and special group by virtue of loving cupcakes. A fondness for cupcakes is not a measure of precious knowledge. A measure of preciousness, perhaps, but not of anything rare and unusual and magical.

I’m sure some of the New Cupcakes are, as you say, just yummy. That’s not the point. The point is the play-acting girly-girl silliness. It’s a slippery slope from devoting whole conversations to the worship of cupcakes to batting your eyes and playing helpless. To marrying a boy who’ll take care of you. To coming out of your sugar-daze at forty and gasping for air and battling panic that all the intensity and joy of life has been submerged under a butter-cream frosting for too long.

I was under the apparently wrong impression that twenty-somethings valued authenticity. Is this cupcake phenomenon a backlash? The penalty we pay for a brief flirtation with the genuine? Was it too hard? Did girls really truly want to belong to a silly little sorority more than they wanted to be connected to all the possibilities?

Cupcakes. Oh how embarrassing if a cupcake were to break the camel’s back.