Costumes and Truth
justam
Posts: 21,410
While waiting to purchase her new jeans, she started thinking about the people she saw in line. She wondered about their insides as they waited to purchase their new costumes. People can be so mysterious! They wear smiles, frowns, or placid facial expressions and all these expressions can be masks or windows into the true person. They wear fashionable clothes or messy mismatched clothes or clean clothes or filthy clothes or anything unremarkable! Everything on the outside is just some kind of cloak or security blanket. It's the inside that actually drives the person. Tell me, who is it in there?! What is that individual all about?!
She remembered an early observation. Maybe she was eight? Watching movies, she noticed that in most Disney movies, they made the good characters beautiful and the bad ones ugly. She thought about how that made stories easier to grasp because a person could SEE goodness or badness on the faces. However, even back then she knew it was not this simple. While only a small person, she had the sense to realize that beautiful people weren't always good and ugly people weren't always bad! It stuck in her mind though, that in our movie culture (at least the Disney or other kid-movie-fare) the audience was passively ingesting this idea.
Pretty girl = heroine, ugly girl = loser, handsome man = hero, ugly man = villain. She noticed this and rejected it even as she realized that the stories were easier to understand with these visual aids.
If our daily lives were truly like that, it would be easier to sort people into good/helpful piles (also known as "a friend") and bad/hurtful piles (aka "not-a-friend"). Unfortunately, or luckily if one shakes a fist at over-simplification, people have characters that are not directly linked to their appearance. They have souls and minds and complicated memories of experience that make their pile-membership unclear.
She didn't really know how to sort people fairly except to observe their behavior and listen to their words over a period of time. The positive and negative numbers build up as days pass. How many times was the interaction with this person positive? Or, did she often leave this person's company and feel something wasn't quite right? Did they make her feel merely neutral, better, or worse in their presence? Their actions and words are necessary clues as to their natural resting site in her mind when she was trying to figure people out. Which is not to say that some people won't live for a while in each pile because some folks are complex and mutable!
She remembered an early observation. Maybe she was eight? Watching movies, she noticed that in most Disney movies, they made the good characters beautiful and the bad ones ugly. She thought about how that made stories easier to grasp because a person could SEE goodness or badness on the faces. However, even back then she knew it was not this simple. While only a small person, she had the sense to realize that beautiful people weren't always good and ugly people weren't always bad! It stuck in her mind though, that in our movie culture (at least the Disney or other kid-movie-fare) the audience was passively ingesting this idea.
Pretty girl = heroine, ugly girl = loser, handsome man = hero, ugly man = villain. She noticed this and rejected it even as she realized that the stories were easier to understand with these visual aids.
If our daily lives were truly like that, it would be easier to sort people into good/helpful piles (also known as "a friend") and bad/hurtful piles (aka "not-a-friend"). Unfortunately, or luckily if one shakes a fist at over-simplification, people have characters that are not directly linked to their appearance. They have souls and minds and complicated memories of experience that make their pile-membership unclear.
She didn't really know how to sort people fairly except to observe their behavior and listen to their words over a period of time. The positive and negative numbers build up as days pass. How many times was the interaction with this person positive? Or, did she often leave this person's company and feel something wasn't quite right? Did they make her feel merely neutral, better, or worse in their presence? Their actions and words are necessary clues as to their natural resting site in her mind when she was trying to figure people out. Which is not to say that some people won't live for a while in each pile because some folks are complex and mutable!
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