Rambling… I can ramble.
For instance, I was talking with a friend of mine about the fortune from a cookie I got some months ago. …Wait, no, that wasn’t me. I found this one taped to the terminal of another computer at my new worksite. It read: “In youth and beauty, seldom is wisdom found.”
…Okay, it didn’t exactly say THAT, but whoever wrote it wasn’t exactly proficient in English; it’s the truth. But that’s what it meant, and I was deliberating with a friend, as I said, over why this should come to pass.
One such reason is… well, have you ever noticed that there aren’t a lot of songs that sing as fondly of guys as they do of girls? Girls light up people’s faces, men and women. Girls are princesses, horse-priestesses, water-nixies, bright flickering dancing tongues of flame that lead you through dark forests (ironic, when you can only pray for immolation; talk to the moths about that one). Guys are… well, take “Leader of the Pack.” Strong, silent, suicidal. Take Jane Siberry (it was her, wasn’t it?), “I Kissed A…” oops. Well, that’s just my point. She sings about kissing a girl, no one sings about kissing a BOY.
…Except for “And Then He Kissed Me.” Shut up, I’m making a point.
(And yes, I realize that the eternally commercialized and dismal Alanis Morrisette even managed to write one upbeat song in praise of some guy. I thought I told you to shut up and listen.)
The thing is… getting by on looks. Yes, that’s where this was headed, but I thought I smelled pizza in the other direction. Looks. Why would someone work on their personality? To get along better with other people. Let’s understand that within the society, it is beneficial to the individual to interact favorably with others. Kinda like a white blood cell, and society is the human body. Being antisocial doesn’t really affect the society except in some small, easily replaceable loss, but it kills off the white blood cell and robs it of any reason for having existed.
So some people have to work on their character development… but what if someone’s being lauded with attention by dint of being physically attractive? Yes, there’s a lot one can do to render one’s self more appealing, but by and large being born attractive is as much an accident as being born hideous. Did you know that when computer image merging was first being developed, one researcher got curious and started loading about 25 facial shots of women, pretty and ugly, and had the computer morph them into a composite average of their traits and features. It produced a very attractive woman; might we assume that someone is therefore attractive because they more or less resemble what we’re used to, and unattractiveness is just a curse of actually standing out and being unusual? Think about THAT for a while.
And in the meantime, I’ll go back to my original topic once more, and suggest that someone who happened to be born in the matter which this society almost arbitrarily (if not just entirely biologically, and NOT intellectually) judges “attractive”, and if their environment treats them favorably by this accident, why should they develop their own personality? Of course they ultimately SHOULD, to become a fully-functional human being, and even that goes a long way towards making someone more attractive (besides the emaciated spindly proportions, pin-ups remind me of parasites for more reasons than five, and no one falls in love with a chigger for VERY long). Because looks fail and fade, the human body is so frail and temporary, but people don’t seem to realize that. Why should they? With short-attention spans being bred into the mainstream culture through staccato, rapid-fire blipverts off of MTV, singing trends being ushered in and whisked away in a matter of a month or less, how could any conforming member of the collective conscious discover the need to breakaway from common thought and imagine that there is a tomorrow, and it might not be exactly like today?
Getting back to my topic a fourth time… now, it gets frustrating, and I’ll use myself as an example. That’s always fun. Growing up, I was led to understand I was quite unattractive, and so to compensate I composed my personality from sources I liked and admired, things that struck me and spoke to me on a personal level, regardless of whether I understood them or not: in my haste to become likeable one way or another, I was less than discretionary about what I let affect me–as long as I liked it, I didn’t overanalyze it but pressed it right… up… against my chest… and let it soak in. And now it’s me. I keep telling people I’m nothing original, if you cracked my skull you’d find a cd-rom installed in there. That’s why I can’t have conversations while running or driving down a bumpy road: “So I said to the nun, I said, “Lady of Spain…” rrrrr… and several butchers’ aprons. In other news… rrrrr… in that case, I was just singing to you. No, stop your crying, it’s… rrrrr… and I assured him I was fine, he let me go, and the matter was soon dropped.”
SO. Here I am working on my personality, and the Ugly Duckling sheds his chitinous layer of features too intense to be born into, and slowly the body catches up with itself and things begin to match. I even out, and over the course of years, I’m led to understand I’m not bad looking at all. I’m not used to this, it still throws me for a curve, but it CAN be exploi-…
Um, anyway. So. Now it’s the age old question of shallowness, one thing I’ve never learned to overcome. Looks over intelligence (and yes, everyone knows enough to roll their heads tiredly to one side and recite in unison, “Of course we would return the suitcase full of money. It would be wrong to keep it.”), but realistically… and after a period of time and exposure to this rock-tumbler we call life, every polished agate or aventurine realizes that nobility isn’t a given, it’s a goal… there are women I’m attracted to at first glance, and women I’m attracted to over many conversations. Very, VERY infrequently are they ever one and the same.
(Important to note here that this is not at all gender-specific. I could just as easily be a winsome lass bemoaning my fate of being locked up in a nation full of slope-browed, knuckle-dragging, bad-beer-guzzling Neanderthals. Just so you know I don’t feel particularly victimized.)
So on the one hand, we have the encultured, developed women who stir my soul from its murky depths, floating to the surface like a tuber in the vichyssoise; and on the other, we have the fortunate accidents who stir my loins. (Men, note that that enormous hissing noise you hear is NOT the monitor cracking and sucking in air, but rather a dozen women all at once sucking in their breath and composing their rebuttal (read: onslaught); but soft, and read on, gentle reader. Women would like you to think that all they’re worried about is a man who has a soul and a brain, but when you’re not paying attention (and sometimes when you are, you thick-headed lummoxes), they have the same damn conversations amongst themselves. Nothing noble, nothing glorious, just an aching void to be filled, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. They just work harder to keep up a brave front. I mean, look at Fairy Tales. Where do you think THOSE came from? A series of allusions spun by women as they holed off by themselves tending to their chores and drudgery back in a day and age when women were truly not allowed to express themselves at all, at ALL (and don’t EVEN try to tell me we’re as bad today as we were a few centuries ago, you don’t KNOW how good you have it in comparison)… and there they sat, spinning tales of intricate analogy, riddle and poetry, expressing their frustrations and desires in a context that no one of another gender (and hence, mindset, as cultural standards have dictated) would grasp immediately)…
Okay, I lost myself there. I’m just saying that I’m facing the same problem a lot of women… PEOPLE find. One of looking for an equal, someone to match our standards, someone to provide at least as much as we’re prepared to provide. I guess that’s what it boils down to. It’s not shallow to desire someone who’s physically attractive. Think of it like this: how many times have you seen a group of adolescent (and age means nothing, here) men-boys talking in a room about supermodels or actresses or singers, women they find attractive, only to have the fray joined by a small league of short, fat women who really, really resent their personalities being denigrated because their bodies don’t happen to match up to some masturbatory fantasy. Mm-hmm, we’ve all seen this, and those women have a valid point. AND YET… if you ask those women what kind of men they’re attracted to… maybe not 100% of them will, but quite a large number (no pun intended) will say “Ooh, tall, skinny guys!” Mm-HMM. I think I’ve made my point there.
SO. I mean, it IS shallow to let your reproductive organs determine your actions (unless it’s self-preservation, such as blocking that kick), but it’s not shallow to feel the natural stirring. A truly aware person will realize what’s going on and recognize it for what it is, as opposed to the hormone-on-two-legs who just stumbles blindly and feverishly after anything calling itself their sexual orientation. Given that…
There’s really nothing to be done. Some people take up a boy/girlfriend ‘cos they don’t want to be lonely. Others really need the sex and truly dedicate themselves to a relationship to secure that, bless their hearts. Still others have completely bought into their parents’ standards and values, and have married the first thing that paid attention to them. (I think that even though I’m trying to keep this gender inspecific, we’re all forming pictures in our heads of who these people might commonly be. Just reflect on that for a minute.) And some precious few actually do manage to stumble upon the best thing for them and marry them, or at least never leave.
Otherwise… it’s a waiting game, and very few people have the patience to wait. Ever listen to someone bitch about “All the good ones are taken!”? That’s 'cos they couldn’t wait (or, as stated before, it was sheer accident that they found something like a soulmate early on). A lot of my friends are waiting. I think they’re going to be waiting a long time. And oftentimes they say the good ones are taken, and oftentimes they are. They’re still going to wait… they’d rather come home to an empty house than one with someone they didn’t love waiting for them.
Don’t ask me where all this was going. I knew in the beginning, but now I’m just going to fix myself some dinner and make a couple calls.
(And yeah, I generalized broadly up there, for many values of ‘up there’. If you’re offended, sorry. No, this wasn’t written with anyone specific in mind. Hope you enjoyed this installment of LNO’s cd-rom mind.)