Thursday, May 22, 2014

Beautiful as we are (I)

This post has been here as an empty draft with only a name on it for exactly one month and one day. Everybody starts with a blank page, but I don't usually struggle with it as much as I did this time, not sure if it's because I have too much to say and I don't know where to start, or because I'm just afraid of being misunderstood, my words and thoughts being misinterpreted or thought of as egoistic and narcissistic.

I'm pretty sure I'll write more on this topic because I have way too many thoughts on presently existent perceptions of beauty and I don't want to make my posts too chunky and overloaded. I know - I'll make a series of posts on it :)

So, to start off, a few days ago, a friend of mine recommended a book called "1984" by George Orwell, which I will definitely read. From what she told me, it's about how societies can become dull only by narrowing down people's vocabularies and making them use basic words. As I think of it, it hits me just how true it may be.

The course I took on my Erasmus exchange this semester really got me thinking about so many cultural and social aspects of my life and my environment, and I think I might have found the connection between the ideas in "1984" and what I heard from my lecturers throughout the course- endless streams of academic vocabulary. Every time a simple word could be substituted for something more scholarly and professional - it was. It is shocking how much my own vocabulary has grown and how critically I started to see things since I started it in January, 16 weeks ago.

Even though I will be writing my own thoughts, mainly based on what I have read when I was searching for quotes to use in my exam papers, I feel like I need a disclaimer here: I do not intend to be egoistic or, worse, narcissistic. I have been told numerous times that I am physically beautiful, and it's not an achievement that I intend to brag about. And yes, technically, from the global point of view, I have, in fact, an "ideal body "- pale white skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, tall, long legs and all this shit that makes people think I am beautiful and assume I'm not smart at all, sadly. That is purely a social and cultural thing about which I intend to talk in my "Beautiful  as we are" series. Here we go :)