“You must stick to your convictions, but be ready to abandon your assumptions.” ~ Denis Waitley
“The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions.” ~ David Brin
Imagine my surprise today when I checked my comments and found the following delightful missive from Alex:
Wow..you are a little moronic I must admit. Who on Earth would use someone as shallow and absurdly small-minded as Kim Kardashian, who is famous for doing not much of anything similar to Paris Hilton, as a role model? I certainly would not want my children looking up to someone like her. Since when is she the standard of real? She has had plastic surgery to obtain what many voluptuous women are blessed with (i.e butt, lips, breasts, even had a nose job!) She is NOT the standard of real, but I do respect her for not being rail thin. I would never look up to her for anything outside of what she is–an attention/media whore. That is what she lives for. Famous for being promiscuous and creating sex tapes “mysteriously” released on the internet. I’ll look up to someone who aspires to be something more than what she unfortunately is.
It seems that Alex was taking umbrage at my post on beauty, “Beauty is not in the face . . .) (https://poietes.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/beauty-is-not-…-kahlil-gibran/) in which I discussed the issue of people being held up as role models for girls and women and how these supposed role models do not have attainable bodies without a personal trainer or air brushing. In this post I also discuss how most women have a warped sense of their body images because of what is thrown in our faces day after day. Personally, I really liked the post, and I received good feedback from regular readers. I should also point out that the woman whose image I placed at the top of my post was Sophia Loren, an iconic beauty simply because she does not look like everyone else.
However, this is not the first time that someone has dropped in on my blog randomly and completely missed the point of a post. I just received an overly long treatise on politics in Iran in response to my recent post on the demonstrations. I do love to get comments, even completely irrelevant ones such as the one above. It let’s me know that people are reading, even if they are reading selectively.
This was my response to Alex:
I have never said that Kim Kardashian is a role model. I said that she could be a role model “as far as how she carries herself.” If you read more closely, what I was commenting on was the fact that she is attractive without being rail thin. Other than that, I know nothing about the woman.
If you were a regular reader of my blog, you would know that my heroes are more in the line of Socrates, Einstein, Virginia Woolf, and countless other philosophers and writers. I have never viewed celebrities or celeb-wanna bes as role models. Nor have I ever pointed my children in that direction.
As for your labeling of me as moronic, perhaps you should read more than one entry on a blog before casting aspersions.
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
I do find it fascinating, though, when people who are obviously not regular readers decide to be a wee bit caustic. Do I know Alex? I don’t believe so. Have I ever heard from her (assuming gender since the name Alex can be male or female) before? Not that I recall. Do we have an ongoing dialogue? No. So how is it then that Alex can call me a moron? This puzzles me.
Let me be clear here. I do banter back and forth with my friends. They have on occasion called me everything from a bitch to a dork to a dweeb, and perhaps a few other things in between. I have never taken offense because this type of name-calling is done in jest with no ill intent, and admittedly, I can be bitchy, and a dork, an a dweeb. Those individuals in my life who are close enough to me to say these things also love me unconditionally for who I am and would not hesitate to be there for me if I needed them. And as I have mentioned before, bantering is one of the things that I do best—the give and take, the witticisms, the seeming disagreements over small things—but always without malice.
I will freely admit that I like to quibble. Accepting everything at face value seems to be just a tad too compliant. Questioning and carping keep life interesting and have often led to long, intense conversations. I like intense. I appreciate a keen wit. I derive great pleasure out of the give and take of an easy banter. In fact, one of my daughter’s first polysyllabic words was sarcastic, as in “Mom, you’re being sarcastic again, aren’t you?”
But that’s not to say that my personality has not led some people to draw conclusions about me that were untrue. That’s probably because my temperament is an acquired taste, and very often, my tendency towards being a curmudgeon can be offputting, even though more often than not, my vaunting comes from insecurity.
“Regret is insight that comes a day too late.” ~ Author Unknown
I do remember one time in which I made a callous remark out of the hearing of someone to a friend of mine. I turned to my friend Amy and said, “God is she ugly.” Amy just looked at me in stunned silence, and then she said, very calmly, “Who are you to judge the way that someone looks?”
I will forever be grateful to Amy for saying this to me because she was absolutely correct. I had no right to judge this other person, who happened to be very sweet and kind. Amy’s comment to me made me feel like the shallow person that I was at that moment. But ever since that day a long time ago, I have watched what I say about people, especially people who I do not know.
Granted, in the heat of a political debate, I can be absolutely caustic, casting my own aspersions about Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, and I do not apologize for that. Individuals such as these men go for the jugular of people with whom they disagree time and again, and I find it abhorrent. I do not claim to be an innocent who has never had a harsh word for anyone. I know that I can be vicious in an argument, but not without deep regret afterwards.
“It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.” ~ George Eliot
Now that I have some years on me, I have become much more even-tempered, if you can believe that. I try to choose my battles well, and I try not to go for the sweet spot just because I can. I am not always successful.
That being said, I can say with honesty that Alex’s comment did not provoke my ire, nor did it hurt my feelings. Rather, I was more intrigued by how someone who has never met me or conversed with me could make such a pronouncement on my character.
So for the purposes of this post, let us just assume that Alex possesses a deep loathing for Kim Kardashian. Or let us suppose that someone may have made fun of Alex in a bathing suit or some such thing. Or even, let us assume that Alex is a beautiful woman who is self-assured and impatient with supposed celebrity. Any of these could be true, or none of these could be true. I have no way of knowing because I do not know Alex. So it would be rather supercilious of me to assume anything about Alex.
And that, dear readers, is my point exactly.
More later on a more interesting subject. Peace.
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 