The Eye Of The Beholder

Saturday was International Home Brewers Day. My fiancé has been brewing his own beer for about two months now and so we went to a gathering of brewers in our area to celebrate the day. Needless to say the place was crawling with men and I was pretty much the only girl for most of the day. But rest assured I can hold my own when it comes to drinking beer. In fact, I have a tendency to pack it away. On our way home my man made a comment about how I fit right in and was like one of the guys. Honestly, I couldn't tell if he was happy with that or not. And I definately couldn't tell if I was happy with that or not myself. I began to wonder if it is it possible to be both guys and one of the ladies? If not, which team do I prefer? (I don't mean this sexually mind you.) Today I was waiting for the max and I was thinking, "can I be hot and cool at the same time?"
Or is it even up to me? See, I was always the girl that the guys told about how much they liked her friend.

I'm not sure why I am only now able to verbalize this. Nor am I sure what to do with this information now that I have it. However, I found out in a glorious moment of honesty with a girlfriend that I am not alone. She said she’s felt this way all her life as well and this is what she tells herself, “The guys who want to be with a truly ‘cool’ girl will find you hot for so many other reasons, even if it's not the physical reasons and they are the ones that are worth being with. The ones who say stupid shit like, ‘Well, she's so fun, but I'm just not attracted to her’ or something similar-who wants to be with them, anyway? Honestly....I feel like kicking those idiots in the shins and being like, ‘You know, it's a pity your stupidity doesn't hurt you on a daily basis.
That's a really cool girl and if you can't see that, you don't deserve her.’"

For me part of being one of the guys includes drinking and eating like one of the guys which are skills I have perfected in the three years I’ve been with my fiancé and can now do quite comfortably even when I’m alone or with my girlfriends. Yay! For me. However, eating and drinking like a man who works on his feet hoisting big plates of steel around while having the metabolism of a girl who sits in front of a computer everyday has it’s obvious consequences. Yesterday, I was feeling really bad about myself because I keep gaining weight so I was pouting and my fiancé wrapped me in a big hug and said, "you're beautiful," even though I didn't tell him what was going on. I said, "no I'm not." And he said the most wonderful thing. He said, "you're my kind of beautiful." That was nice, but at the same time I was thinking "I want to be universally beautiful," you know? Even if, as Susan Jane Gilman says in Kiss My Tiara, it doesn't make the line to the toilet any shorter.

What I realized was that I didn't feel like I was my kind of beautiful. And that's when I realized that I didn't know if I wanted to be "hot" or "cool." Sometimes it makes me really mad that I even have to deal with this. Why can't we all just be beautiful? So my girlfriend says to me, “there's a few answers to that question. None of which you're going to like…. Well, I was going to first react by saying, ‘Well if we were all beautiful, none of us would be. We'd just be the same.’ Then I was going to say, ‘We need to be beautiful in our own minds. That's the only place that counts. ’But, both of those are kinda bullshit.’” I like the first answer. It doesn't sound so bad.

Maybe we are all beautiful we're just looking at it from the wrong angle. But maybe we're not supposed to feel beautiful, because maybe if we all felt beautiful it would be dangerous. I wonder if beautiful people feel beautiful. If we’re all beautiful and I don’t feel beautiful then that would be a no. What is it anyway? Beautiful? Is it a certain fat percentage? A certain angle of the nose? A certain width of the eyes? I like Webster’s definition: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit : LOVELINESS. However, I don’t know how the guys would feel about it.