Seeing Seth’s photo where he is rocking the yellow tassel reminds me of my obscure and futile attempt to smash the machine. It was like this: there were two colors of tassels. Some got white and some got yellow. The yellow signified that you had pleased The Man. You had measured up to some arbitrary and archaic standard. I don’t know, maybe you hadn’t vomited and smashed your guitar on stage, or you hadn’t parked your car in any place too outrageous on senior prank day.

Although I was annointed with a yellow tassel, I wanted to make clear my disdain for this ham handed attempt at social stratification.

Holding the tassel in my hand, I first ruled out partial immolation of the tassel. Unclear messaging, instead of broadcasting my ideology, I would simply look like a fool who had burned his own tassel in a smoking accident. I decided that if I bleached the tassel so that it was half white and half yellow, it would show my contempt for the system (while still not giving anyone the impression that I hadn’t measured up to that archaic standard).

I filled the bathroom sink in my house with bleach and gingerly dipped the end of the tassel in. No color change. This thing was appropriately-enough completely synthetic. I lay the whole thing in the bleach and came back a few minutes later. The color hadn’t changed at all, but the ends of the strands looked frayed. I drained the bleach and ran the tassel under cold water. As I was rinsing it, first one, then all the strands, completely unraveled. The end result was still yellow but more than twice as long as the original tassel.

While the protest symbolism was lost, it did look unusually weird, which seemed like a good enough thing to settle for, and I went with that.