Quote of the Day:
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.
–Robert Lee Frost

Amen Mr. Frost. Ladies and gays, just like Peter Pan, stay young forever. At least, we admire youth forever. I think this picture shows why we get old, fat and ugly instead:

Beauty is only skin deep. So, apparently, is the desire to be beautiful. No one wants to put up with the result, at least if they know what it entailed.

On the other hand, everyone wants a piece of beauty. Muscled hunks? Yes please. I just personally don’t want to be wasting my life away at the gym every day. Blood, sweat and tears are not my style. I’m more of a chiffon cake kind of girl.

Are we obsessed with beauty because most of us can’t have it? If everyone was pretty, would we cease to care? If everyone was rich, would money matter anymore? The ripped muscle hunk isn’t even a fair comparison, because he worked at his appearance. What about those born pretty? Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom come to mind here. Or, for that matter, Robert Pattinson, as America apparently agrees with me here.

When we are beautiful, there’s always the temptation to wonder if we’re beautiful “enough.” When we’re not, we’d take any part of being beautiful that we could have, screw the hierarchy of it!

Is it because of People magazine that I intended to end my life over rejection issues? Is that any less ridiculous than blaming a bad night at the clubs? We’ve become so sensitized to what people think about us and our appearance that literally nothing else matters. On a typical night, I would go out dancing with 3-4 friends, have some cocktails, make out with a few random dudes and go home, maybe with one (or more) of them.

But on a night when I didn’t get hit on, or hit on “enough,” those other times where I did have fun didn’t matter. I wasn’t beautiful enough right then and there to matter to these other people (complete strangers!), so life was not worth living. As soon as that thought would surface in my mind, there was no escape until I could finally get home and overdose. That was my only relief valve. In the gay community especially, perhaps, there is a great deal of attention focused on hooking up. If you go out dancing and don’t go home with someone, you’ve let down the community. This creates a second set of unrealistic expectations. a) be beautiful, always and b) hook up tonight, every time. The concept that I could even critically evaluate these statements and see how extreme they were didn’t even cross my mind, and if it had I would have pushed it away. My reality was so real to me that it didn’t matter whether it was right or not. My life literally depended on my version of reality, and it was killing me.

So my ending thought/question/statement is this: if we pretend that age is “just a number,” then can beauty be “just a number” too? Or does that only continue to perpetuate the fraud that we perpetrate on ourselves whenever we half-heartedly say and whole-heartedly do not believe that age is “just a number.” We’ll always notice beauty. What else should we be noticing?