Beauty Standard

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Beautiful people herd together, so as the ugliest. That’s the common sense by the way, but sometimes it doesn’t always happens, right? So, few years ago, I learn a new point of view about beauty standard, thought I wanna share it here. I have some friends who are not so fortunate because they are sightless. Mostly young adults and they lived in a dorm like building which is a country shelter. And Oh boy, they are cool kinda guys and always fun to befriend with. They like to joke about colors, which was I didn’t understand at first. But then I realized, that for them there are no such thing as colors, there’s only one, black. It took so long for me to hit that punch line, even when it did, it didn’t seemed appropriate to laugh at it. But they did laugh, and I found myself a new kinda joke to smile about. And I learn that they’re not as incapable as we thought them to be. They’re normal on their own ways. They do sport, they hang out at the malls, they have talents, most of them are students at normal school, and some of them are college students. They are gadgeting, facebook’ing, and dating. And they who are not lived at the shelter anymore have jobs and families. One day I met a girl who was pursuing her singing career to joined Idol’s show, other day a friend told me that she’s building an emergency school for the poor kids and she became the principle of the school, another day I met a boy who work as a quality control programmer at an IT company. Where’s the abnormalities in that? And so, back to the beauty standard. I learn this concept from the female angle, which is simple but meaningful. I was visiting the girl’s dorm, we were just talking and joking around. Somehow we ended up talking about another girl (which wasn’t at the room at the time) they said things about how nice and beautiful that girl. I immediately compared each of the girls’ appearances and disagree to their conclusion. I couldn’t followed their thoughts because I was so shallow minded and because I judged a book by its cover. I’m glad I didn’t have to voice out my disagreement because one of the girl started touching the other girl’s face and said “You’re beautiful too. You have eyeballs, you can blink your eyelids.” It didn’t surprised me much but I knew I was having a slight ‘what the…?’ moment with myself. Then she explained to me about the simple standard for their world, “Everybody is beautiful if they have eyes, a man is handsome if he has strong hands and elbows that you can hold on to.” Wow, that’s it huh? And yes, many of them are not blessed with eyeballs or open eyelids, let alone eyesight. And yes, they preferred to judge someone’s elbow because that’s where they could put most of their trust to. But no, I never put it that simple. There are physical beauty and inner beauty, and everybody knows how someone is beautiful in their own ways, still it’s hard not to judge someone by a millisecond glance. Surely, that was another type of enlightenment that stays in my head for years maybe for the rest of my life.