Originally Posted by roachboy

when i was younger, more a sprat and naive at that, i think i equated outer and inner in ways that were more or less in line with the way the teevee and the other aquarium ornaments that i would swim around in the shallow end of the pool ordered me to equate (them.

but as i advance toward decrepitude i've found intelligence and curiosity about the world both more rare and interesting in people than being-pretty. (but all together in the same person can be pretty great.)

and there are lots of pretty people who neither engage nor interest me and lots of pretty people who i'd rather be sealed in a 55 drum of puke than be trapped with for a long drive in a car. that applies to most less physically attractive people too.

but it's also true that what one finds attractive is based far more on projection than on "reality." the physiologial studies folk have waved their hands in the general direction of above are mostly designed to generate some kind of repeatable, quantifiable-seeming underpinning to something that's really pretty arbitrary. like other folk have said, it seems that what's understood as attractive follows from what people are told they find attractive. like a lot of things it's as much a matter of repetition---so conditioning---than anything else, these ideals or norms of beauty and the assumptions that prevail out there in the big flat about the relation between the external and internal.

i seem to have lost track of what i was talking about.