Wednesday, July 07, 2004
The Beautiful, and the Ugly and the Unrelated
Well, seeing as how nobody answered that last post, I figured I'd have a stab at it.
Experience tells me that whenever I attempt to even touch on touchy feely stuff my posts turn into a protracted ramble with more tortuous curves than Rachel Stevens. Heh heh. :p
The points of view herein are my own. I'm not trying to impress them upon anyone, and I'm not calling any of you, even if it sounds that way (sigh years of debator training) to subscribe to my opinions. I'm just... rambling.
What makes a woman beautiful?
Beauty
Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. I reckon I've figured myself out by now, and I know I'm gonna write something rather nebulous and silly-sounding to anyone who doesn't actually know me. (ie who doesn't know that I'm actually an airhead and fruitcake, for real)
Romanticism in a male is usually rather unbecoming.
Beauty, of the cover-girl variety is easy. You have it, or you don't. Which is actually untrue today, thanks to plastic surgery and all manner of cosmetic products that bewilder the average male like myself. (Foundation? Isn't that a story book? Nivea? Isn't she some MTV presenter?) Ever notice how stunning women look in their wedding shoots? (Well, looking at my best buddy's photoshoots, his wife sure did. Heck even he did, and THAT is an achievement, believe me. heehee)
But beauty like this is transient, and somewhere deep down in our caveman hearts us normal blokes know (I like to believe, anyhow) that the measure of a woman is not her face, or her bust, but in her head. When getting right down to it - not that "it", get your minds out of the gutter. The other "it", which becomes important when we outgrow the shagging-beautiful-women stage (which, in England, is somewhere around 75) and get all serious about choosing a life partner (which, in Singapore, is generally around 19 - I'm a cynic. Can you tell?) even us guys start to realise that beauty is more than skin deep. And deeper than muscle too. Cough.
Again, this depends on a lot of circumstances, including meeting the Right Girl.
I'm not talking about meeting Ms Let's Settle Down and Have Kids As Painlessly As Possible, which I rather believe happens too often everywhere around the world. I'm talking about the Right Girl.
Glossing for now over the Right Girl, which I'll cover in the second half of this less than intellectual discourse, let's get back to "beauty", through the eyes of a smitten male.
When a guy loses his heart, he becomes incredibly biased. It's an equal mix of fiery jealousy (Y chromosome), gentle fondness (X chromosome) and a ridiculous and absurd desire to pledge, and share everything with his woman, including his life.
Woe betide the female who asks him if she "looks fat in this", because, in absolute honesty, she will always look (barring sudden overnight weight gains of oh, 20 kg or so - let's be realistic here) beautiful to him.
Long hair, or short, or even no - she'll still look beautiful.
Because the measure of beauty, through the eyes of love, is who a person is.
It's a measure of her soul. (And also I suspect, his, and what he's looking for in life.)
An appealing appearance catalyses the initial attraction - and quite often is required to penetrate the near invulnerable armour of the caveman's attention span and cranium, but if he's smitten enough, and we're not talking saucepans, light fixtures and desktop ornaments ala Hilary Clinton, but that lurrrve thing everyone else keeps describing and hankering after, well... he'll stay by her, even as she fades into senescence, and the hair greys, and the lines increase exponentially across her face.
And as you all read this, no doubt most of you (especially the blokes) will scoff, and choose words like "balderdash" or "bollocks" (only, uh, slightly ruder) to describe what you perceive as this bloke trying to do, namely suck up to the birds.
But dammit, I'm not. I've seen it before.
And now I've inadvertently moved on to Love.
These are the things I've seen.
Love
Two old wrinklies very much in love. One of the great things about being a doctor is the sheer number of people you meet, and sure, I haven't seen that many wrinklies who still have it. But I've seen one or two. I've seen one, without the other, an old man who could talk about the shrapnel in his abdomen from his war days as a paratrooper, being shot at by flak guns by the the germans coming out of his 'plane and keep you enthralled. He also rambled a bit about his wife, and what a wonderful, wonderful person she was, and how she moved, and how he remembered her, and how he hoped to see her again someday. His eyes misted up, and he gradually fell into silence. I asked him how long she'd been dead for, and it was a good twenty years.
My grandparents had it too, once upon a time. One mostly deaf, the other mostly blind, and yet they had that look (rarely) of pure affection, that endured the ravages of time.
And it made me jealous. And wonder if I'd ever find anything remotely like that.
It's... sigh I feel so unoriginal here... that something that takes other people's breaths away when they see two people look into each other's eyes, even across a room.
And they don't even have to be young, or even beautiful - just in love.
Perhaps it's even that strange, overwhelming feeling as you look at her saying Grace, that to this person you'd give up your work, your hopes, and your dreams - and even perhaps your very life -- if she needed you to. This'll probably evoke automatic feelings of horror in a lot of you. It's what makes women stay with the bastards that batter them every night, and what makes men stay with women who just want a piece of the property / bank balance.
But, thing is, if you're really lucky and it's two-way, then there's a certain naive trust mingled in there that She/He wouldn't abuse it. Just because.
And it's more than just physical. It's more than hand-holding, or cute pet-names. More than bear hugs that feel warm and secure and infinite. More than passionate romps in bed. Err or for the more creative, on floors, tables, washing machines, sharp objects, um treetops, aeroplanes... whatever.
It's not just more than - it's completely independent from. It can just be... two people, sitting down laughing with each other. Looking into her eyes. Getting slightly overwhelmed. Conversation petering out as you both keep that visual embrace sustained. Until you stop yourself falling further into the infinite, and pull yourself laboriously back up to the precipice, and continue that sentence some four seconds later - and she doesn't even seem to notice.
It doesn't even have to be that.
It can just be two people sitting down next to each other, listening to each other breathe. Not touching or anything, just sitting close.
The one thing it has to be - is it has to be two people. And I'm not stating the obvious here, but rather not-stating the obtuse.
I don't know if I ever found love.
I know I was in love with Her once; very, very much so. And very much against my will... laughs. But I don't know if she ever loved me.
We weren't like that. We flirted a lot, and we kidded around. We never committed the cardinal sin of asking. And that was part of it, for me.
And so, in retrospect, gathering the available evidence together, there was something there. But what it was exactly, I'll never know for sure I guess. Whatever it was, it lasted a long time. And sometimes I still wonder... was that two people? Or just one.
The Ugly
All this is making me sound the huge romantic.
But I'm not. And this is where he gets all self-centred. Re-minisce is capable of a lot of different things - and of being a lot of different people. And quite often he's not in control of himself. Bizarrly, this might be a conscious act - to stop being in control. Psychoanalysis was never his forte.
I was the caveman, too. And that came just as easily, although it grated and chafed like the number four slacks do during a route march, laugh.
With Her, I remember doing, and saying the damndest, dumbest and (ugh) possibly some of the sweetest things I've ever done in this life.
And often I just did them "because".... it wasn't a conscious thing. Sometimes it felt rather surreal, hearing myself say and watching myself do the things I did, groaning inside to myself. Cheesy. Cheeesssyy. Don't do it... bugger. He did it anyway.
My point is, perhaps it's more than a single individual committing a conscious and premiditated act of pseudo or even genuine sincerity. Perhaps it's also a synergistic effect, and what comes from within, really comes from without - or rather, is born of the chemistry between two people. Chemistry - that movie-word you never really hear about anymore, except in the odd occasions on-screen when there isn't any. Ie Richard Gere and Jen Lo... heh.
Perhaps the thing writing that elusive "script" that I've sometimes felt bound by isn't me, or even God (err if it is you, God, sincerest apologies) but that indefinable something between the two people -- perhaps it's their mutual aura mixing. Maybe it's "chemistry".
I knew what to do with the ex, having seen - and DONE it before. Score one for the SNAGs.
But much of the time, I couldn't. And I didn't want to. And the mean streak within me stopped me. Sure, I still did some stuff, and it was pretty damn (ugh) sweet.
But it was also very, very intentional.
And while it made her day, it didn't make mine. And as time wore on, and minor battles accumulated into a long-drawn campaign, these slowed up, till they stopped. Suddenly I knew what it would be like - and why it would be scary to be married to the wrong person. For life! Quiver.
The point is, unless it's born of sincerity - and quite often, for me anyhow, spontaneity - it's "ugly". And it has to be two people, in tandem. Like a tandem bike. One falls off, they both go down.
The Right Girl
I've reconsidered, actually.
And I'm not after all going to write about the "right girl". A part of me does want desperately to wax lyrical about that "something about the eyes", and about wit, and humour, and cynicism, and romanticism, and strength, and vulnerability and... and and... all sorts of things that contradict each other.
But for one I don't actually want a queue of prospective applicants... laughs... not that there will be one. heh heh.
and for another, there's a far simpler reason.
I'll know her when I see her.
Sure, it doesn't happen often, the ?is this the Right Girl? Feeling... which bugger it, tends to happen with women on other continents.
But I trust that I'll know it when I see it.
Because I did once.
Me
A bit of egocentric self-examination now. Why do I tend to go slightly ga-ga over women far away, rather than near at hand?
The armchair psychiatrist (which most of us have at least a minor incarnation of) within my head, also probably the cynic, aka Voice 1 puts his money on a latent committment phobia. Maybe that Y chromosome is more active than you think.
This would certainly explain the long chain of woulda-coulda... almost but didn'ts-because-too-far-away thingies... and it would also explain why, when given a choice of "prospectives" near at hand he virtually chose the one least likely to work out. Maybe, pause, you just like hurting yourself.
Dammit, I've been watching too much Brit TV. And maybe I've been in this country for too long.
There's another voice though which maintains, rather less vocally, that perhaps the latter was an anomoly, brought about because I listened to that first voice.
And perhaps the reason for the far-at-hands is because, bugger it, it's just so rare to even come close to meeting this elusive "right" person.
I do know this much.
I want to meet her as much as the next person does. (more! heh)
I want pretty much the same things as everyone else does. Err except maybe an HDB flat. But that's more a matter of dowan but no choice than wanting. laughs.
But... I would rather spend a lifetime waiting, and wanting, and hoping... than waste it with the wrong person because I gave up waiting.
And someday, should I die alone in an unnamed residential home somewhere in deepest peru (or even singaland), the irony would be that I wouldn't, in my own mind anyhow... have wasted my life. I'd rather die with my dreams, than have my dreams die on me.
*****
Unrelated
(and previously untold, to anyone)
Once upon a time, en-route to his final confrontation with an ex minor-coach in a tourney somewhere out there, as he sword-saluted before every bout, he silently mouthed the words "For my Lady".
She wasn't his Lady, and She wasn't there. And She didn't even know he was there, and She'll never even know about it.
But he did it anyway, because he had to. It was part of the script.
Perhaps in some other parallel universe, in some other dimension, She knew, or perhaps She was there, or perhaps even, She was his Lady.
Perhaps he had to do it because of all those other "hes" out there, in those other universes, who were banking on him to say the words.
Perhaps that silver he won, rather apathetically... meant something in those other universes.
Who knows?
Experience tells me that whenever I attempt to even touch on touchy feely stuff my posts turn into a protracted ramble with more tortuous curves than Rachel Stevens. Heh heh. :p
The points of view herein are my own. I'm not trying to impress them upon anyone, and I'm not calling any of you, even if it sounds that way (sigh years of debator training) to subscribe to my opinions. I'm just... rambling.
What makes a woman beautiful?
Beauty
Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. I reckon I've figured myself out by now, and I know I'm gonna write something rather nebulous and silly-sounding to anyone who doesn't actually know me. (ie who doesn't know that I'm actually an airhead and fruitcake, for real)
Romanticism in a male is usually rather unbecoming.
Beauty, of the cover-girl variety is easy. You have it, or you don't. Which is actually untrue today, thanks to plastic surgery and all manner of cosmetic products that bewilder the average male like myself. (Foundation? Isn't that a story book? Nivea? Isn't she some MTV presenter?) Ever notice how stunning women look in their wedding shoots? (Well, looking at my best buddy's photoshoots, his wife sure did. Heck even he did, and THAT is an achievement, believe me. heehee)
But beauty like this is transient, and somewhere deep down in our caveman hearts us normal blokes know (I like to believe, anyhow) that the measure of a woman is not her face, or her bust, but in her head. When getting right down to it - not that "it", get your minds out of the gutter. The other "it", which becomes important when we outgrow the shagging-beautiful-women stage (which, in England, is somewhere around 75) and get all serious about choosing a life partner (which, in Singapore, is generally around 19 - I'm a cynic. Can you tell?) even us guys start to realise that beauty is more than skin deep. And deeper than muscle too. Cough.
Again, this depends on a lot of circumstances, including meeting the Right Girl.
I'm not talking about meeting Ms Let's Settle Down and Have Kids As Painlessly As Possible, which I rather believe happens too often everywhere around the world. I'm talking about the Right Girl.
Glossing for now over the Right Girl, which I'll cover in the second half of this less than intellectual discourse, let's get back to "beauty", through the eyes of a smitten male.
When a guy loses his heart, he becomes incredibly biased. It's an equal mix of fiery jealousy (Y chromosome), gentle fondness (X chromosome) and a ridiculous and absurd desire to pledge, and share everything with his woman, including his life.
Woe betide the female who asks him if she "looks fat in this", because, in absolute honesty, she will always look (barring sudden overnight weight gains of oh, 20 kg or so - let's be realistic here) beautiful to him.
Long hair, or short, or even no - she'll still look beautiful.
Because the measure of beauty, through the eyes of love, is who a person is.
It's a measure of her soul. (And also I suspect, his, and what he's looking for in life.)
An appealing appearance catalyses the initial attraction - and quite often is required to penetrate the near invulnerable armour of the caveman's attention span and cranium, but if he's smitten enough, and we're not talking saucepans, light fixtures and desktop ornaments ala Hilary Clinton, but that lurrrve thing everyone else keeps describing and hankering after, well... he'll stay by her, even as she fades into senescence, and the hair greys, and the lines increase exponentially across her face.
And as you all read this, no doubt most of you (especially the blokes) will scoff, and choose words like "balderdash" or "bollocks" (only, uh, slightly ruder) to describe what you perceive as this bloke trying to do, namely suck up to the birds.
But dammit, I'm not. I've seen it before.
And now I've inadvertently moved on to Love.
These are the things I've seen.
Love
Two old wrinklies very much in love. One of the great things about being a doctor is the sheer number of people you meet, and sure, I haven't seen that many wrinklies who still have it. But I've seen one or two. I've seen one, without the other, an old man who could talk about the shrapnel in his abdomen from his war days as a paratrooper, being shot at by flak guns by the the germans coming out of his 'plane and keep you enthralled. He also rambled a bit about his wife, and what a wonderful, wonderful person she was, and how she moved, and how he remembered her, and how he hoped to see her again someday. His eyes misted up, and he gradually fell into silence. I asked him how long she'd been dead for, and it was a good twenty years.
My grandparents had it too, once upon a time. One mostly deaf, the other mostly blind, and yet they had that look (rarely) of pure affection, that endured the ravages of time.
And it made me jealous. And wonder if I'd ever find anything remotely like that.
It's... sigh I feel so unoriginal here... that something that takes other people's breaths away when they see two people look into each other's eyes, even across a room.
And they don't even have to be young, or even beautiful - just in love.
Perhaps it's even that strange, overwhelming feeling as you look at her saying Grace, that to this person you'd give up your work, your hopes, and your dreams - and even perhaps your very life -- if she needed you to. This'll probably evoke automatic feelings of horror in a lot of you. It's what makes women stay with the bastards that batter them every night, and what makes men stay with women who just want a piece of the property / bank balance.
But, thing is, if you're really lucky and it's two-way, then there's a certain naive trust mingled in there that She/He wouldn't abuse it. Just because.
And it's more than just physical. It's more than hand-holding, or cute pet-names. More than bear hugs that feel warm and secure and infinite. More than passionate romps in bed. Err or for the more creative, on floors, tables, washing machines, sharp objects, um treetops, aeroplanes... whatever.
It's not just more than - it's completely independent from. It can just be... two people, sitting down laughing with each other. Looking into her eyes. Getting slightly overwhelmed. Conversation petering out as you both keep that visual embrace sustained. Until you stop yourself falling further into the infinite, and pull yourself laboriously back up to the precipice, and continue that sentence some four seconds later - and she doesn't even seem to notice.
It doesn't even have to be that.
It can just be two people sitting down next to each other, listening to each other breathe. Not touching or anything, just sitting close.
The one thing it has to be - is it has to be two people. And I'm not stating the obvious here, but rather not-stating the obtuse.
I don't know if I ever found love.
I know I was in love with Her once; very, very much so. And very much against my will... laughs. But I don't know if she ever loved me.
We weren't like that. We flirted a lot, and we kidded around. We never committed the cardinal sin of asking. And that was part of it, for me.
And so, in retrospect, gathering the available evidence together, there was something there. But what it was exactly, I'll never know for sure I guess. Whatever it was, it lasted a long time. And sometimes I still wonder... was that two people? Or just one.
The Ugly
All this is making me sound the huge romantic.
But I'm not. And this is where he gets all self-centred. Re-minisce is capable of a lot of different things - and of being a lot of different people. And quite often he's not in control of himself. Bizarrly, this might be a conscious act - to stop being in control. Psychoanalysis was never his forte.
I was the caveman, too. And that came just as easily, although it grated and chafed like the number four slacks do during a route march, laugh.
With Her, I remember doing, and saying the damndest, dumbest and (ugh) possibly some of the sweetest things I've ever done in this life.
And often I just did them "because".... it wasn't a conscious thing. Sometimes it felt rather surreal, hearing myself say and watching myself do the things I did, groaning inside to myself. Cheesy. Cheeesssyy. Don't do it... bugger. He did it anyway.
My point is, perhaps it's more than a single individual committing a conscious and premiditated act of pseudo or even genuine sincerity. Perhaps it's also a synergistic effect, and what comes from within, really comes from without - or rather, is born of the chemistry between two people. Chemistry - that movie-word you never really hear about anymore, except in the odd occasions on-screen when there isn't any. Ie Richard Gere and Jen Lo... heh.
Perhaps the thing writing that elusive "script" that I've sometimes felt bound by isn't me, or even God (err if it is you, God, sincerest apologies) but that indefinable something between the two people -- perhaps it's their mutual aura mixing. Maybe it's "chemistry".
I knew what to do with the ex, having seen - and DONE it before. Score one for the SNAGs.
But much of the time, I couldn't. And I didn't want to. And the mean streak within me stopped me. Sure, I still did some stuff, and it was pretty damn (ugh) sweet.
But it was also very, very intentional.
And while it made her day, it didn't make mine. And as time wore on, and minor battles accumulated into a long-drawn campaign, these slowed up, till they stopped. Suddenly I knew what it would be like - and why it would be scary to be married to the wrong person. For life! Quiver.
The point is, unless it's born of sincerity - and quite often, for me anyhow, spontaneity - it's "ugly". And it has to be two people, in tandem. Like a tandem bike. One falls off, they both go down.
The Right Girl
I've reconsidered, actually.
And I'm not after all going to write about the "right girl". A part of me does want desperately to wax lyrical about that "something about the eyes", and about wit, and humour, and cynicism, and romanticism, and strength, and vulnerability and... and and... all sorts of things that contradict each other.
But for one I don't actually want a queue of prospective applicants... laughs... not that there will be one. heh heh.
and for another, there's a far simpler reason.
I'll know her when I see her.
Sure, it doesn't happen often, the ?is this the Right Girl? Feeling... which bugger it, tends to happen with women on other continents.
But I trust that I'll know it when I see it.
Because I did once.
Me
A bit of egocentric self-examination now. Why do I tend to go slightly ga-ga over women far away, rather than near at hand?
The armchair psychiatrist (which most of us have at least a minor incarnation of) within my head, also probably the cynic, aka Voice 1 puts his money on a latent committment phobia. Maybe that Y chromosome is more active than you think.
This would certainly explain the long chain of woulda-coulda... almost but didn'ts-because-too-far-away thingies... and it would also explain why, when given a choice of "prospectives" near at hand he virtually chose the one least likely to work out. Maybe, pause, you just like hurting yourself.
Dammit, I've been watching too much Brit TV. And maybe I've been in this country for too long.
There's another voice though which maintains, rather less vocally, that perhaps the latter was an anomoly, brought about because I listened to that first voice.
And perhaps the reason for the far-at-hands is because, bugger it, it's just so rare to even come close to meeting this elusive "right" person.
I do know this much.
I want to meet her as much as the next person does. (more! heh)
I want pretty much the same things as everyone else does. Err except maybe an HDB flat. But that's more a matter of dowan but no choice than wanting. laughs.
But... I would rather spend a lifetime waiting, and wanting, and hoping... than waste it with the wrong person because I gave up waiting.
And someday, should I die alone in an unnamed residential home somewhere in deepest peru (or even singaland), the irony would be that I wouldn't, in my own mind anyhow... have wasted my life. I'd rather die with my dreams, than have my dreams die on me.
*****
Unrelated
(and previously untold, to anyone)
Once upon a time, en-route to his final confrontation with an ex minor-coach in a tourney somewhere out there, as he sword-saluted before every bout, he silently mouthed the words "For my Lady".
She wasn't his Lady, and She wasn't there. And She didn't even know he was there, and She'll never even know about it.
But he did it anyway, because he had to. It was part of the script.
Perhaps in some other parallel universe, in some other dimension, She knew, or perhaps She was there, or perhaps even, She was his Lady.
Perhaps he had to do it because of all those other "hes" out there, in those other universes, who were banking on him to say the words.
Perhaps that silver he won, rather apathetically... meant something in those other universes.
Who knows?
