Merry Christmas

So, I was thinking again (dangerous, isn't it?), and the thought occurred to me that people are like Christmas presents. And the onus here isn't on the women/men being viewed as the presents, but rather it is on the men/women that think of them as such.

The prevailing thought process is that we're all adults, and we're all mature, and by gum, if you have the prettiest package in the world, or just a plain brown wrapper, it really doesn't matter, because what does matter is what's inside, right? And just about everyone loves to say that. You hear it all the time. "Great personality", "wonderful sense of humor", "insightful, intelligent rapier mind" and so on. To not say that the ugly duckling can be a swan-well by God, it's shallow! But the truth is, most people simply don't mean it. Hell, I don't, so I'm certainly not climbing up on some pedestal as a representation of what is good and righteous in the world. You simply can't blame people for this. All I'm pointing out is the God's honest truth, as opposed to the saccharin concept of inner beauty. Let's face it, if the box looks like one of Santa's reindeer gave it a good kick, most people aren't too interested in the present.

So there's the rub-we (as in most of us) are still mostly fascinated by what's on the outside. If you're looking under the tree, the package that gets your attention is the one with the right shape, the right wrapping, the right bit of heft...and then you open it to discover it's all wrong, or even worse, it isn't even remotely similar to what you'd expected. It's a deluxe box of Band-Aids, not an I-Pod! And it happens to us time and time again. Oh look, someone got me the new CD I wanted...nooooo, they got me a cut-price cd-rom computer game, that looked like a music CD when in its pretty paper...

And don't try to tell me that people and their expectations of each other are any damned different. We build this fantasy vision of what a person is like based on how much we like the way they look, or in this digital age, how much we like the way we THINK they look. And we do it over, and over, and over. Pavlov would be disheartened.

As noted, I'm as guilty of it as anyone-there's no stones being thrown. I was just driving in the rain the other day, pondering this human condition. Which is really quite a mess, methinks.

Regardless, I think a little honesty with ourselves would go along way. So next time you're congratulating yourself on how wonderful you are, and how you're really interested in someone new because of what a neat person they are, think about it. Would you really be as enthused about this "wonderful" person if they looked like Amy Winehouse or Karl Malden? The short answer of course is "no". The slightly longer answer is "hell no".





Sometimes I really am just a shower of the brown smelly stuff, it's true.