The Opposite Attracts

Personally, I like the perfect shapes, I like everything to shine, I like the colour explosion. And yet, on a trip to the Garbage Dump next to Bucharest, I took much more photos than if I would have had I stopped in the "Museum of perfect shapes". That is because the perfection I admire, I try to build, while the rest remains full of a poetry I notice only when I see. 

It looks like the apparent accessibility of new, associated with the image of perfection, makes us bored with beauty. So we started searching for beauty in the abnormal, in all that is deviated and in everything that doesn’t fit  our rules. It’s fascinating to us this aesthetic of ugliness. And that extends to everything that surrounds us. If so far we’ve been appreciating the  perfection of the shirt of the man we were listening to, today it seems to become memorable the bad tooth of our speaker or the element that takes him out of the crowd. 

And everything seems to be taken beyond our control: we have a fascination towards the macabre subjects, a sick interest towards the decomposing and the imperfection of the human being. 

I wonder if this betrays an uncertainty of ourselves that we are trying to discover in the imposed models?

And even weirder it seems that we start to see even in commercials, that advertising material that entices us to buy “the new”, “the magic”, “the perfect”, a world that no longer represents the aspirational model, but somehow returns to the reality we are embracing. And this in a moment which, theoretically means our world is rising from the economical crises so spoken of. It looks like we gave up searching for this "beautiful". It looks like we are bored with "perfection". 

And yet our world is full of aestheticians, of people who “beautify” us and our world accepts so easily the modified models to fit the aesthetic norms. But the fascinations for ugly remains clearly bigger than our behavioural decisions. 

In a world that becomes more perfect every day, we start to love more the simplicity and the story beyond the paint. It’s so strange our world and the perfection we are beginning to stop appreciating and to search again for the “fleur du mal”.

Woman in Her 30s

I received as a gift this book from a friend of mine when turning 30 and I decided to open it and start reading it once again.

The story is about a father who tries to worn his little girl about mistaking her infatuation with love over an older man, a colonel. The father is fairly concerned with his daughter's  desire to marry him for his position and the impression he makes on the little girl. And in spite of her father's advice she decides to marry him. And the rest of the story should be read to understand what Balzac was trying to say. 

The main idea I got was that in our early years we are looking for models, for men who can be up there on a pedestal and who can guide us in our lives. These are stories very well put together. The guy on the horse was a colonel who has lived most of his life as a career man. Now he was looking for a wife to stay home and wait for him. 

The modern woman I believe is a lot more sophisticated. She wants to have her career and her life to be guided by her rules. It is very hard for the modern woman with a career to make up her mind about who is suitable for her to stand by for the rest of her life. By the time she reaches that point in her career she is self sufficient and he only needs to come in and feel in a soul whole. And he needs to understand that coffee can be made or just drunk, but it doesn't make a difference at the end of the day who made it and who drunk it. It matters that there is someone there in the morning to share the coffee with. And it matters that his arms hold you and tell you "Good night!" at the end of the battle. Somehow, the 30 year old woman now-a-days is the colonel who needs a sure thing when arriving home.