Let's Get Physical, Physical
The world's as ugly as sin...
And so are lots of people in it.
We have this reporter who works out of one of our bureaus. Her area comprises several counties that can be best described as backwoods. The more politically correct term for her beat would be rural... way rural. And every person this reporter ever interviews, male or female, is highly unattractive.
If you were to judge the area by her stories you'd come to the conclusion that those counties had no attractive people living there. At all.
Have you ever really thought about ugly people? They come in all different kinds, you know.
There are the ugly people who don't know they're ugly. You know, the ones who keep up with fashion trends and try to blend in with the beautiful people. They're the ones who try really hard to look good and only succeed in drawing more attention to their ugliness.
Then there are the ones who know they're ugly and try to compensate for it by wearing trendy clothes, caking on makeup and attempting to fix their hair. The end result is usually painful to look at.
Then you've got the ugly people who know they're ugly and have given up on trying not to be. They're the ones who look like they just rolled out of bed, tripped into their closet and fell into whatever clothes happened to be lying on the floor.
And then you've got the people who are beautiful on the outside but whose insides are so twisted and black they end up being uglier and more undesirable than those physically unattractive people who fall into the first three categories.
It's that last category of ugliness that makes this world ugly. Sometimes I think if we were all ugly we'd be better off. But I think that even then someone would come up with the concept of beauty and we'd decline back into the superficial mess we're in now.
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4 comments
The relative nature of beauty and ugliness was artfully explored in an episode of the old TV series The Twilight Zone. A young woman whose face we hadn't yet seen underwent reconstructive surgery in an effort to correct her hideous ugliness. Her face remained hidden under bandages until the final moments of the program. Also hidden from the view of the camera were the faces of the doctors and nurses that surrounded her. The final scene was the unveiling to determine whether or not the plastic surgery had been a success. There were gasps in the room when the bandages fell away to reveal the face of a beautiful young woman. They held up a mirror for her to see herself and she cried, but they were tears of sorrow, not joy. At the same time the doctor expressed his regrets that they were unable to do anything to help her. With that the camera panned the faces of the medical staff and we were able to see that they were all grotesque aliens. Turned out this medical drama was unfolding on a distant planet where beauty and ugliness are the exact opposite of how we perceive them here on earth.
ReplyDeleteMost of us are familiar with Marilyn, the black sheep and ugly duckling of the Munsters clan.
I encourage everybody to watch David Lynch's brilliant film The Elephant Man. It would be hard to imagine anyone uglier than John Merrick; yet he was a man of great intelligence, culture and refinement - a kind and gentle soul who never complained about his lot in life even though he had every reason to. John Merrick is the greatest example there is of a truly beautiful human being.
Geesh, Ash, I know I'm ugly but you didn't have to write a post about how ugly I am. :)
ReplyDeleteBut I know what you're saying. We place so much emphasis on beauty, and even the lack thereof, on the outside, that we forget about the person as, well, a person. It's sad.
I have a coworker who has a very horrible attitude that it emphasizes her ugliness. Seriously. She thinks she's doing the company a favor just by coming to work everyday. She complains about everything and ridicules everyone. She's so full of herself. Because of that attitude, we gradually noticed how much she resembles a piranha and a frog. I'm really serious. She's that ugly and bitchy.
ReplyDeleteAlso, she thinks she's pretty. Would you like to see a picture of her? I will totally show you. :)
I'm so glad you guys actually got the point of this post! I was kind of worried that it would come across as an attempt at bad humor instead of an intelligent look at the superficialness of this world.
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