Mirrors, mirrors, everywhere

Somewhere between the years 1995 and now, I turned into someone else. Someone who cared more about how she looked than how she thought, someone who talked more about the outside of humanity than the in. Someone who avoided politics with excuses like “It’s just too complicated, I always feel like I’m listening in on the later part of a conversation, and so I never know what’s going on so why bother?”. Someone who has given up on defending the things she used to argue on for hours about. Someone who knows much, much, too much more about the Jolie-Pitts than the war. Someone, it seems, as a tiny part of me observed with horrified fascination, who would pick a Cosmopolitan over Time while waiting for her food.

I think the actual moment that I began to realize that this was happening, that I was abandoning the mind for the body, was one night when I met a girl who laughed as she told the story of a friend who had done something incredibly ditzy..and I didn’t get it.

Can I, as so many have, blame this on the world’s adulation for the beautiful, on the engorged aesthetes craving, demanding more? On the lavish cornucopia of brashly honest I’m-here-to-make-you-pretty-nothing-more beauty products that cunningly line the walls and floors of shops, glittered cushioned snares you willingly spring? On the snubbing of speaking one’s mind (because that’s just being a smartarse)? On Boyfriend’s love for Sophia Bush and Rachel Bilson?

No, no, if I must be truly honest (or as honest as I can be, anyway – my own brain lies to me sometimes), I am this way the reason I am so many other things; I am lazy.

It’s easier to be pretty than to be smart. Wearing funky threads and gorgeous shoes takes less time than, say, reading Nietzsche and actually understanding it. Cute smiles and tousled hair is more instantly endearing than a love for geology, and intriguing leaves. A flirty giggle (don’t cringe, I already did) gets me more than my stand on religion and/or homosexuality.

And so that little horrified part of me watches this, my graceful degradation (a phrase I love so much I wish I’d come up with it but I didn’t – Uncle did) to a shallow pool of stillness, reflecting the world, but ultimately empty..nothing more.