Beauty

In an era of feminist and politically correct values, not to mention the closely held belief that all men and women are created equal, the fact that all men and women are not—and that some are more beautiful than others—disturbs, confuses, even angers. For better or worse, beauty matters. How much it matters can test our values. With luck, the more we live and embrace the wide sweep of the world, the more generous our definition becomes. In fairy tales, only the pure of heart could discern the handsome prince in the ugly frog. Perhaps we are truly human when we come to believe that beauty is not so much in the eye, as in the heart, of the beholder. The search for beauty spans centuries and continents. A relief in the tomb of the Egyptian nobleman Ptahhotep, who lived around 2400 B.C., shows him getting a pedicure. Cleopatra wore kohl, an eyeliner made from ground-up minerals. The search for beauty could be deadly. Vermilion rouge used in the 18th century was made of a sulfur and mercury compound. Men and women used it at the peril of lost teeth and inflamed gums. They sickened, sometimes died, from lead in the white powder they dusted on their faces. In the 19th century women wore whalebone and steel corsets that made it difficult to breathe, a precursor of the stomach-smooshing Playtex Living Girdle. The search for beauty is costly. In the United States last year people spent six billion dollars on fragrance and another six billion on makeup. Hair- and skin-care products drew eight billion dollars each, which fingernail items alone accounted for a billion. In the mania to lose weight 20 billion was spent on diet products and services—in addition to the billions that were paid out for health club memberships and cosmetic surgery.

Sasha Cagen

Sasha Cagen is an American writer, editor, and entrepreneur best known for starting the quirkyalone movement. Her first book was Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics, and her second book To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us, a collection of 100 handwritten lists and the stories behind them, was released by Simon & Schuster in November 2007. She is the founding editor and publisher of To-Do List, a "magazine of meaningful minutiae" that used the idea of a to-do list to explore the details of daily life, and of todolistblog.com. Among other major recognition, To-Do List was named Best New Magazine of 2000 in Utne's Alternative Press Awards, Reader's Choice. Cagen cofounded StyleMob, a social networking site "dedicated to real people and their style." The site started in early 2007, and has already received a lot of media coverage. Cagen has appeared on the BBC, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and NPR's "Day to Day" and "Talk of the Nation". Quirkyalone received attention in newspapers and magazines including USA Today, the New York Times, and the London Observer. The Quirkyalone book has been translated in German, Danish, and Portuguese, and was named a finalist in the Books for a Better Life Awards, 2004. Cagen's essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines including the Village Voice, Utne Reader, and Men's Health, as well as in numerous anthologies. Cagen got her start as a writer in the "girl zine revolution," writing about topics ranging from the class politics of attending an elite women's college to the taste of grape soda and the fear of being pushed or pushing someone else into the subway tracks. During the mid-nineties in New York, Cagen co-edited the popular girlzine Cupsize. Cagen attended Amherst College and graduated from Barnard College. A native of Cranston, Rhode Island, she lives in San Francisco.

Passion

Why doesn't passionate love last? How is it possible to see a person as beautiful on Monday, and 364 days later, on another Monday, to see that beauty as bland? Surely the object of your affection could not have changed that much. She still has the same shaped eyes. Her voice has always had that husky sound, but now it grates on you—she sounds like she needs an antibiotic. Or maybe you're the one who needs an antibiotic, because the partner you once loved and cherished and saw as though saturated with starlight now feels more like a low-level infection, tiring you, sapping all your strength. Studies around the world confirm that, indeed, passion usually ends. Its conclusion is as common as its initial flare. No wonder some cultures think selecting a life-long mate based on something so fleeting is folly. Helen Fisher has suggested that relationships frequently break up after four years because that's about how long it takes to raise a child through infancy. Passion, that wild, prismatic insane feeling, turns out to be practical after all. We not only need to copulate; we also need enough passion to start breeding, and then feelings of attachment take over as the partners bond to raise a helpless human infant. Once a baby is no longer nursing, the child can be left with sister, aunts, friends. Each parent is now free to meet another mate and have more children. Biologically speaking, the reasons romantic love fades may be found in the way our brains respond to the surge and pulse of dopamine that accompanies passion and makes us fly. Cocaine users describe the phenomenon of tolerance: The brain adapts to the excessive input of the drug. Perhaps the neurons become desensitized and need more and more to produce the high—to put out pixie dust, metaphorically speaking.

College Experience

The best experience that I felt, was the feeling of independence. Although I do not live on campus and still live with my parents, I feel that I am being more responsible for my live that before. In high school, it was very simple; all you had to do was follow a set of classes complete them and then graduate. But college is different. This most noticeable one, is that you pay for your education. Last week, I dropped $2,500 to pay for summer and fall semester classes. I also need to buy books which might cost an extra $500. In total that would be $3,000, and to me that is about 5-6 months pay for me. I felt so mature, when I paid for my classes out of my own pocket. I definitely feel that I would be able to support myself in the future. And college has helped me realize that I can fend for myself. I don't feel like a child or teen anymore, but as an adult.

Sasha Cagen's Term

Quirkyalone is a neologism referring to someone who enjoys being single (but is not opposed to being in a relationship) and generally prefers to be alone rather than dating for the sake of being in a couple. Magazine publisher Sasha Cagen came up with the term "quirkyalone" on a Brooklyn subway platform on New Year's Eve, 1999. She expanded the concept into an essay in the first issue of her magazine To-Do List. When the article was republished in the Utne Reader in 2000, Cagen was surprised by the fervor of responses from readers who felt their lives had been validated by her work. As a result of these responses, Cagen opted to expand her essay into a 2004 book, titled Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics. International Quirkyalone Day is February 14 and was chosen as an alternative to "the marketing barrage" of Valentine's Day. It started in 2003 as a "celebration of romance, freedom and individuality". Celebrations of the holiday have been noted in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Reasons for why we fall in love

Psychoanalysts have concocted countless theories about why we fall in love with whom we do. Freud would have said your choice is influenced by the unrequited wish to bed your mother, if you're a boy, or your father, if you're a girl. Jung believed that passion is driven by some kind of collective unconscious. Today psychiatrists such as Thomas Lewis from the University of California at San Francisco's School of Medicine hypothesize that romantic love is rooted in our earliest infantile experiences with intimacy, how we felt at the breast, our mother's face, these things of pure unconflicted comfort that get engraved in our brain and that we ceaselessly try to recapture as adults. According to this theory we love whom we love not so much because of the future we hope to build but because of the past we hope to reclaim. Love is reactive, not proactive, it arches us backward, which may be why a certain person just "feels right." Or "feels familiar." He or she is familiar. He or she has a certain look or smell or sound or touch that activates buried memories.

What surprised me...

I learned that i was a quirkyalone. When I reading through the articles in chapter 5, I came across the one written by Sasha Cagen. While I read her article, I felt that she described my dating personality very well. I often did feel that I was the only one with my attitude toward dating. But I felt relieved when I saw other people felt the same, even though its like 5% of the population. Its interesting though; how she mentioned we'd rather spend the night alone, instead of going on a bad date. Or that when we are alone, we find insight about ourselves and other things. But my favorite was when we do find that special someone "the earth quakes."