Oh the beginning definitely was, sumi, and the very end. In between was eh.

Oy. Oy. I am temporarily kravved out. Teaching at 11:30 and administering a test from 1:30 to about 7:00. Which means I got to teach the entire yellow belt syllabus in quick succession. While being evaluated.

Oy. Need lying down.

Kalshane! Daddy! Cool.

While I am completely besotted with my lemon pound cake a reviewer (see, I'm sharing) said it could be moister. Hrrm. I followed the CI recipe pretty much to a tee (shorted it by ¼ cup of sugar). I can't work out what to tweak. Take it out of the oven a touch earlier?

I wish we could just be beautiful as individuals. Not because we conform to a set of ideals like a show dog, but because we are beautiful as ourselves.

Not to pick on you, because this is more something I've been mulling over for a while... but I'd rather we just stop making the idea of beauty so powerful. Some people are beautiful. Some people are smart. Some people are tall. Some people are blonde. You know? I'm not beautiful. I can be kinda pretty, with effort. I can be sexy, but that's easier. I'd like to be considered beautiful, but obviously not enough to do everything it would take, so I guess it's really more of a wish than a priority. I mean, we don't go around claiming, "Everyone's tall in their own way." Responding to "I'm beautiful and you're not" with "everyone's beautiful in their own way" seems like buying into the idea that it's terribly important that we all be beautiful. I feel like it'd be better to say, "Yup. So? That's not the end-all be-all."

Note: I am nowhere near as well-adjusted about this as I'm making it sound, but that's kind of my point. I think.

When I was a wee bairn, I was ugly. My mother is a terribly practical sort, so she admitted this with the sort of precision that included mentioning my (somewhat uncanny, for a little black girl) resemblace to Mao Tse Tung (which explains why I knew what the Little Red Book was at a very young age--I even tried to read it, since we had one in the house my mother used to illustrate her point. Boring.).

She told me, she told others, she had no reluctance.

My little sister was a terribly cute baby. All dimples and smiles and loose curls where I was snarls and frowns and bald patches on my scalp. She had the professional pictures taken of her, looking coyly out from underneath the blanket.

Thing is, my mother never played favourites. She had an ugly kid and a cute kid, but what she really had was two daughters. I could be ugly and her daughter and she really only cared about the latter designation.

It made me nonchalant about looks from a very young age. It took society to tell me it mattered, but I liked my mother more, so I stuck to her version of the story.

Pretty is pretty. Pretty is fun to look at. But that's what pretty's for. Looking at. If you don't let it, it doesn't do much else.

I think "beautiful" is more subjective, and has far more meanings, than "smart" or "tall" or even "talented," though.

A very good friend of mine is really, truthfully, pretty homely. She doesn't have the features that are considered traditionally attractive. But when she grins? When she's laughing, and happy, and really lit up? She's beautiful then, because it has more to do with how looking at her at that moment makes me feel than what she looks like.

That said, I agree with Strega that the focus on attaining beauty has become absurd. I do appreciate the campaigns from companies like Dove, though, that are stressing "real beauty" or "natural beauty" and feature women with little makeup, no implants or cosmetic surgery, and normal people hair. What makes them lovely in the ads (aside from the soap they're purportedly using, or the moisturizer) is that they appear happy, and confident, and at ease.

Well, for most of history almost everywhere the most valuable thing about a woman was her looks (well, and her virginity). Nobody cares about the king's smart daughter or his really nice daughter or the really funny daughter.

Humanity is probably better off than we've ever been in this regard.

Saturday Night Live was dismally unfunny tonight, just as I'd feared it would be. Though they did buy my approval by putting Matthew Fox in a midriff-baring costume at the end.

Not to pick on you, because this is more something I've been mulling over for a while... but I'd rather we just stop making the idea of beauty so powerful.

You know what? You're totally right, and I'm glad you called me on it.

I guess I was thinking more along the lines of "there are many ways to be beautiful," which still allows for the fact that not all of us are. But what I said, and what I was thinking, came out more like, "beauty is everything so we'd better all pretend to have it," and that's not something I believe. So thanks.

I was remarking to a friend the other day that I sometimes felt like no one was beautiful, that it was all manufactured in one way or another. Comes from absorbing too much media about models or cheerleaders or makeovers or celebrities without makeup oh noes.

I don't really know why beauty became such currency. Maybe because women didn't have access to other types of currency or power in times past?

Wasn't beauty more currency for the privileged? I'd imagine, for men whose wives had to do stuff for everyone to get by, indicators of their practicality would be better currency--what is then attractive is what suits them best for the task. Childbearing hips, perhaps, or strong hands for working in the fields.

All else being equal, pick the pretty one. But how often is all else equal, especially when your sustenance is on the line?

ita says something similar to what I was thinking. At least in the last few centuries, beauty was completely worhtless next to the possibility of increasing wealth. A woman's value was the wealth of her family far more than her looks. Before that it may well have been fertility or strength. Beauty has only been a career in maybe the last few decades.