
I remember hearing somewhere that English manors located along the country’s coastlines used to face away from the sea. Back in the day, the rolling green view in toward land was considered far better than gazing out at endless boring blue-grey ocean.
Cut to today, when ocean views are the most want-that thing in real estate. People like me can and do spend hours staring out at the crashing waves. And a whole wellness culture has grown up around the idea that large bodies of water are not only supposed to have calming properties, but also make us feel more inspired and creative.
What other once-shunned wonders will we one day think of as wonderful?
Like stretch marks. Objectively, they’re these amazing glowing opalescent markings that hug and accentuate the loveliest curves of our bodies. They’re like an opal! Or the magical inside of an abalone shell! Way better than any tattoo, and a whole lot more involved and hardcore to achieve. Why aren’t these bodily artifacts of growth and expansiveness more sought after? Why aren’t we tearing out holes at the hips of our jeans and the backarms or our tops to show them off?
Or crepe-y, swaying elderly flesh, with blue veins peeping through (like the finest blue cheeses) and brown age spots (like dappled faun fur). Really all that added texture and color is so much more beautiful and interesting to look at than the smooth uniformity of young skin. And yet.
On the flip side, what about things that we think of as lovely that are actually kind of repellant?
Like lips. They’re nothing more than the red inside of our mouths, slowly trying to turn themselves inside out. Which we periodically moisten with our wet prehensile tongues. Instead of hiding these freak holes of the face, we smear them with color to purposefully draw the eye there. Ditto fingernails, these hard little shells living at the ends of our ten folding phalanges, which we lovingly grow out and sand into shapes and paint miniature paintings onto.
Or what about eyebrows? Two random lines of satellite fur, hanging out inches below the rest of our hair. Or the fascinating sea-creature weirdness that is our ears, with surprise diggings of yellow wax living inside? Or the bellybutton, the snarled alien-mouth cave that interrupts the uninterrupted midriff, which the young Britneys of our world pierce and crop their tops to show off?
Or TEETH! In the US especially, we spend years wiring them up and bleaching them so they look like a uniform line of Chicklets gum. Just like the Mayans, who used to strap boards onto their infants’ heads to give them the nicely rounded shape of an ear of corn. Or foot binding in China, or neck-lengthening necklaces in Myanmar.
How big of a collective mind shift would our world have to undertake to turn all our manor houses around to face the other way, and suddenly decide that our current beauty ideals are no longer as enviable as we once thought, and that the hideousnesses we used to buy salves and tinctures to solve are actually quite nice?
As my amazing friend Annie Galvin once gleefully announced back in 2005: “There will never be a time when ultrawide bootleg jeans with viciously pointed-toe pumps aren’t in style!”
So ends another hmmmm from the small, gray chestnut coilings that are the mind of Evany Thomas.
