Beauty is in the Eye of...Who?

Originally posted April 26, 2006

This is a strange subject, but I've been thinking...how do we all know what we really look like?

I have four different mirrors in my house. The bathroom mirror makes me look fat. The closet mirror makes me look OK -- somewhere between how I envision myself and chubbier. The standing full-length mirror makes me look wayyy skinny. And the dresser mirror makes me look what I consider to be "normal."

That got me to wondering, which mirror is right? How do I know what I really look like? Not that I should care so much, but it just irks me that there are four different versions of "me" all going on in one room. Is there a way of finding out whether the reflection projected from a mirror is true and accurate? If not, that means there could be thousands of different mirrors in the world, and no one is seeing their true self.

Cameras are all different too, so pictures are not a good solution. My friend Beth swears I have a camera that made her look skinny in photos of her wedding. I think it's just a regular camera, but then I notice too sometimes that different cameras can churn out some pretty good photos of generally unphotogenic me.

I suppose you can have someone stand next to you and tell you whether you really look like the reflection in the mirror. But sometimes it's a subtle difference that's hard for people to pinpoint.

Basically, what I'm saying is....you can't trust any reflection! This boggles my mind. Perhaps more than it should.

Feh, maybe I should concentrate more on the soon-to-be-explosive fad of Amish rapping instead. It's going to happen, I tell you. It will happen!

Dom commented: first of all: QUAKER RAP! yah! that's where its AT! ("yo, you think you're hipper 'cause you got a zipper?")

second: there is a SIMPLE solution to your mirror problem- just have your body cast in plaster and make a replica of yourself... DUH! its either that or you stop caring about the few inches of difference the mirrors make and start concentrating on some of those "lesser" problems that are plaguing society... you know... world peace, poverty, where the socks go when they don't make it out of the dryer, etc.

you get 2 kudos- just incase that skinny mirror is right... we don't want you wasting away to nothing!

Kim commented: No no no...my point has been missed. It's not that I NEED to know whether the extra inches are on me...it's that we're all being subjected to different reflections! None of us has a true and accurate perception of ourselves because we have to rely on mirrors and cameras, which, as I said above, are unreliable! Don't you feel lied to? Cheated?

No? OK. I was just musing...