For several years I’ve been percolating on a project relating to beauty. Specifically, I’m into people’s differing tastes. I love overhearing people behind me at a movie having a conversation that goes:
“Why didn’t you tell me your friend was so good looking? I would have worn a clean shirt.”
“What, so-and-so? I can’t believe you find him attractive!”
Just now I walked a block or two with a couple of girls from the neighbourhood, and one was going apey for a local trumpet player’s looks. Getting only vague support from her friend and me. Awesome.
I have practically no taste in common with my friends. Whenever Rebecca thinks someone is really beautiful, they just look really skinny to me. Kelby’s definition of beautiful women seems totally random to me. Growing up, I thought I just had immature taste because I could never predict who my mum would declare “beautiful,” but I still don’t agree with her most of the time.
I love this. I love that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so obviously. This is what I think about whenever anyone gripes about the evolution of sexual attraction or the media’s portrayal of women. I think: but none of my friends can agree on who’s a sexpot. I think: I can dress however I like, and someone somewhere will drool.
Galen and I have nearly identical ideas about both male and female beauty, which is a fun thing to have in common. I had forgotten, until I started making a list of my friends who have weird taste in hotties, that we used to say we had the same taste in girls. Right before the two of us got together, Rebecca made the connection that a girl I’d been a bit obsessed with the previous summer was Galen’s girlfriend at the time. That was one of the things that got counted as fate during the infatuation stage.