Ugly is as ugly does....

Getting on BART was strangely.. well, spooky, and it took me a while to figure out why. Of course, as usual, I could understand the conversations around me, which were all stupid and petty. But it was also something else, and it took about 3 stops to figure it out.

I was surrounded by ugly people (Thank God I am so beautiful!).

Or rather I should say that I could recognize all one-million shades of ugliness that surrounded me. In the first six months of my time in Korea I became much more aware of differences in Korean faces. But my taxonomy is still pretty broad. It takes a pretty aggressively ugly Korean to impress me for just that reason. If a Korean doesn’t have oozing, bloody string-warts, or hydrocephalacy, then they look ok to me. But in the United States I have 5 decades of experience with noticing and describing all the little things that make someone ugly. So, bored on a train, what am I to do but to catalog this. ;-)

That’s one thing. The other is that in Korea I see a quite different slice of Americans, so my vision of what we look like has been skewed. For instance, there are very few truly old Americans in Korea. Because the vast majority of Miguk outside of Seoul are teachers or professors, they don’t include people over 60, and very few over 50. In fact, I think the demographic swings strongly towards the early-to-late 20s. This is, of course, when people a still good-looking, and have had enough time to figure out how to maximize their looks (before the long, hideous slide begins at about age 30).

Finally, Koreans spare no expense to make themselves look good. No Korean would ever dress as haphazardly as the average US citizen does. And I was taking a BART train through Berkeley, perhaps the epicenter of haphazard retard-dressing in the US (Dreadlocks, nose-rings, and burkhas? Dude, you’re a white guy from Orange County!).

Throw all these things together, and you get a difference (part in my head and part based in demos and behavior) in how people look.

OTOH? The weather here is great!