Beauty

On beauty: First I'll start with a story. My wife and I were watching The Devil Wears Prada, which I mentioned in one other post this week to discuss Meryl Streep's Peter O'Toole rating (like a 6 or so.. which gets her up to about the bellybutton, starting with the boots), and the wife of mine made comment about the party dress, the black one, worn towards the end. She gets compliments on that dress! My response was that fashion has nothing to do with beauty. In a sense I'm pretty sure my knee-jerk response was close to the mark. I'm sure beauty has to be an ingredient, much like water is an ingredient in cologne, but compliments are never made on the water, but on the .01 percent olfactory chemical.

This morning I mentally added some ponderings on the relationship between beauty and youth. There was a girl on the green line who was clearly young and clearly pretty, so much so that I felt like a dirity old man just looking at her, and secretly hoped I would never have a daughter that looked like her. My next thought was of course, mental rubberband snapping on the wrist 'stop looking for beauty it's the path to sin you worthless bug.'

It's much easier for the young to look pretty or even beautyful, so youth must have something to do with it. Also fashion models are young and skinny.

This post is really going nowhere at the moment.. either I have to think more or I have to come to a point or both, and probably in that order.

One characteristic of writing a blog is the feeling that someone will come along and read it. Suddenly the writer must consider what his reader is thinking. Writing letters and emails to people I know I'm clearly a prattler and clearly not interested in the other person's reaction except that they understand most of what I am saying. Being understandable is the key.

On a blog, there's another layer I've found and that is that being understandable is not enough. Now I will say clearly that there are a great number of blogs out there, most of them I think are Filipino, and by most I mean all of the 5 or 6 I have stumbled across by using the >next blog link, which are clearly beyond incomprehensible except to them and their friends. Then there's the vast majority that I wouldn't care about anyway. The additional layer is value to the reader, and in this case the specific quality of NOT recycling conventional wisdom. Even more specifically (so far the set (value to the reader) subset (wisdom)) something that came to me as an ephiphany that somehow once on paper sounds trite. That was the direction this opinion on beauty was going, which wet the fuse.

The hairdryer for this fuse would be something fresh and original, or at least the same ideas recycled in some fresh original way (isn't that pretty much everything in the world?). So my thought went to, what can I say about the connection between beauty, fashion, youth and compliments that might be fresh and interesting to a reader? Worse, something that might be interesting to me? I interest myself only to a certain extent. I like my off the cuff responses to my wife, but in discussion or dialogue my interest wears thin if there isn't some controversy. There's nothing controversial about youth being beautiful, nor models being skinny, unless you go down the path of Lolita or anorexia.

The most interesting part of this post then, is my mental flogging and my feeling of being a dirty old man just for looking, and my wish that I be over this whole phase of life looking at girls and appreciating their hair, eyes, makeup, nose, or some combination of everything, and move on to the good, harmless castrated lover of all and nothing. More about that later then, I suppose, since this post is long enough already.