Hmm. Oh, of course I'm going to burp as soon as I hit record.
Hi, everyone,
and welcome to another episode of the podcast, all the things ADHD, all the burps all the burps. Yes. That's because it's my I'm really engaged in my seltzer habit. And yes, it's called Waterloo. And it was originally like, because the different brands were different grocery chains here in the States. And so it's like, you could get polar Wegmans. And you could get you know, well, Kirkland, obviously at Costco, and so you'd have the Costco would always have the variety packs, but there was always either watermelon or grapefruit. Oh, always twice as much grapefruit as anything else. They're like six limes, six lemons and 12 grapefruits, and you're like, I don't want 12 grapefruits, and I can't do watermelon because of a issue when I was 16. And you had I still can't do watermelon. Oh, go fine with vodka but watermelon. i Oh, it's turns my stomach was going yeah. So anyways, this last trip to Costco, we found a flat of Waterloo packs, of which there were zero watermelons and zero. Mouse as we call it, but 00 grapefruit and so I had to buy it because I was just like, folks. Finally, finally, finally.
Surprising no one. Lee my experience is different from yours. For the grapefruit seltzer above all seltzer. So if we lived near to the same Costco, we could just like do it my sister and I used to do with Halloween candy like just do swaps, right? Which are the which are the seltzer flavors you don't like? Okay, let's swap the trick is to find somebody compatible with you who does not have the same taste in seltzer? And that would be me.
Yes. Well, it's not even that I don't like grapefruit the way I don't can't do watermelon. It's just because there's always twice as many of them right it's just like I you consume all this much of it and you're and then you're just like, come on, like I've enough. Also it is. It is fall here. Fall has come here with a vengeance. leaves are turning. Yes. There we go at pumpkin everything. She's got a mug. Snoopy bug. It's a Snoopy mug with pumpkin everything. It's a great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. But I've also known we've talked about this in past episodes, but it's also lumpy pumpkin season. Right? And so I'm assaulted. Every time I walk into the grocery store, buy the pumpkins and there's always a lumpy one front and center, which just gives me the like, I can't do it. And I'm like, you can't see me right now. But I'm making like the Heebie Jeebie motion.
My body phobia. Yeah, what you're describing there and we will not describe it any further. Because just saying the word triggers. Yes. Yeah. content warning. Do not look it up. Yeah, everyone.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if you but if you know, you know, if you know, you know, you know, you know, if lucky, Lumpy pumpkins trigger you then you know, and lumpy pumpkins trigger me.
What the hell are we talking about? Oh,
yeah. So, actually, there's a segue between lumpy pumpkins and what we're talking about.
I just say lumpy pumpkins about 10 more times, because that's fun to say.
Yes. It is fun to say but not fun to visualize. At least for me. No. So because we're what we're going to talk about today is beauty. And I find lumpy pumpkins, not beautiful. But I also have friends who are obsessed with them. So beauty is in the eye of the beholder. See, there's my segue. I had a segue. Yeah, right. Like some people, the lumpy pumpkin is beautiful. This is the part
where I then derail you by saying, Oh, that reminds me of the the very famous McSweeney's internet tendencies peak on its decorative gourd season. Motherfuckers Yeah, everyone should yeah, Google. If you're into lumpy pumpkins, just Google that. Yeah, it's decorative, gorgeous season. Motherfuckers Great. Great set. hairpiece, okay, yeah. UD difficult. Here's the difficult I'm being difficult for you, right? Yes.
No, and specifically difficult beauty. So what, what sort of inspired this was Tracy McMillan cottom was doing a podcast she was guest hosting on Ezra Klein. Tracy was doing the podcast and she had on the author of a new book called difficult beauty. And it is part memoir, part treaties on beauty. I have downloaded the audiobook and of course haven't listened to it yet, because that's why I am
why we're doing this podcast before you've listened to the audiobook? Absolutely,
yeah. Well come on, when when am I ever going to listen to this audio book, like, audio books are even worse than real books because at least with a real book, it's physically there taunting me. Whereas like an audiobook, it is just like in my audible app, it just like, you know, out of sight out of mind is like, also like my Kindle books, they just, they're on my phone, but I never see them on my phone. So they're like that. Anyway, I do have it though, I purchased it in support of the author. Like that's, I mean, even if I never read the book, I can feel good, in that I am supporting authors with with the money monetary transaction of actually purchasing their book. That's by small contribution. But they and Tracy has written in her book thick, also about beauty. And so they have a really interesting conversation around being apart from the quote unquote, beauty industry. And that it was something that it was just because it was framed as not being accessible to them, because of who they were in the bodies that they inhabited. That, you know, they could sort of observe it from a more, you know, almost anthropological, sociological, she's a sociologist of trustees, and sociologists, and we'll just say, from a sociological perspective, and it was, it was a really excellent conversation, I recommend if I remember, I'll put the link to it in the show notes.
The episode came on September 6, then it was called The Subtle Art of appreciating so called difficult beauty. And the author of the book is Chloe Cooper Jones, and the book is entitled to actually easy beauty.
Oh, easy beauty. I'm sorry. Thank you for correcting the again, we've I've prepared really hard for this, I thought longer and harder about the segue I was going to make with the lumpy pumpkins than I actually thought about. You know, actually, what I was going to talk about,
this is a real lumpy pumpkin of an intro.
Well, they are they all lumpy pumpkins on an intro? Let us be honest here, aren't they all? Lumpy pumpkins? Yeah, the interview story? Yep. And so I was really interested in having a conversation around this difficult and easy beauty or just beauty in general, from a neurodiverse perspective, because, or even from an invisible disability perspective. Because I always, like I really got me thinking about how I thought of beauty when I was a kid and younger and coming up. And it was, I came out, it was like, I was always I wasn't excluded. But I always felt beauty adjacent. Right, because I had the physical care about many physical characteristics that you would think of as being traditionally beautiful, right? I have the blond hair, I have the blue eyes. I wasn't a skinny kid. But you know, I ended up getting I ended up getting I ended up getting fairly large boobs. Um, you know, there's, it's, you know, didn't have them at first. And then they came and it was like, Oh, hey, look at this. That's the thing that I have now, as we all do it or not have the again depending and, and but I was. But again, like I was, I was sort of oblivious to it. Like, I was like, Well, I guess I don't, I didn't know what it was supposed to feel like to be beautiful. You know what I mean? And then, and then I was also a swimmer, which, you know, I still haven't like, you know, etched on my brain in elementary school. I was the only girl who didn't figure skate, right? Or you didn't at least try one sense of Yo, yeah, no, I know. But you know, it was that was it was the 80s. Right? Like everybody in Canada. Women's Hockey was not quite available to us at that point. And so if you wanted to be on skates, and you were a girl, you'd figure skating.
Right? But I
was the only girl that didn't do it. Because I was like, not for me. Thank you. And I still remember I had my like, swim team varsity jacket, so proud of it. And I was always a weird kid anyway. And I still remember walking home from school one day, and you know, even if you weren't friends, you always walked in packs because it was the 80s. And that's what you did. Not with parents just packs of kids who might not even like each other, but at least we were safe. She says she says to me, she goes Oh, so you're you're a swimmer. And I said yes, yes. I'm a swimmer and you really liked the guest. She's like, Oh, my cousin was a swimmer. She got these really big shoulders. is so ugly,
right? Yeah.
And, and so it's, it's this was this interesting time to kind of grow up in where you didn't have as many. There wasn't a sense of athletic beauty in women, not the way that we have even now or even in the 90s when Nike was decided they could just sell to women. And so it was, they were all like, throw like a girl and reclaiming all of that. And then, and then grunge came along, and you just was like, Beauty was a flannel shirt over heroin chic body.
I mean, but nobody really had to know because the clothes were quite large at that, yes. Okay. So, we all grow up in cultures, that have certain ideals of beauty, and in general, things that are beautiful, like, as an aesthetic category tend to be sort of smooth or symmetrical, with like, both softness and sharpness at the same time, as a sense of control and proportion to it right? That it is not too much or too little, right? Beauty is something generally we would describe as as producing a harmonious effect a pleasant effect all of those things are things that people in bodies that differ from the norm struggle with and they're also things that people with brains that differ from the norms struggle with as well right? This is this idea of proportion, right? Because we're always out of proportion about everything or was like too much of this and too little of that and it's not you phoniest It doesn't sound nice, because we're talking too much or too loudly or we have weird verbal stems or, you know, our bodies don't behave the ways our bodies are clumsier. A lot of us have joints that don't work quite right. I found out that I've always had a skin that's quite prized in the golf community, because you can see all my veins right through everything. That's a sort of cadaverous and that turns out to be associated also with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which I also have, which is comorbid quite often with autism and just means I, my skin's weird, so you can see all my veins like on my face, through my arms on my legs, veins, veins everywhere, I'm in a very unusual way, it's difficult to be beautiful when your body is different, right? So it's not even that you sort of have a normal body that's failing to meet some idealized proportions, sort of like Instagram style, but like just the way other people can get on a bicycle and kind of write it and you can't write, you know, words to describe neurodivergent people often is like, ungainly, and awkward and inappropriate and clumsy, clumsy and a portion and like weird, like, you know, people scrutinize, you know, one of the symptoms that people look for in an autism diagnosis situation is toe walking, right, which is an unusual gait, that many people with autism have this sort of bounce on the ball of their foot as they're walking, sort of like, like the, the floor is lava, but only to their feels kind of thing, right? There are ways that that we move that don't seem dancer, like we know, we fall off of chairs with little provocation, nothing seems to fit us correctly. And beauty in that sense seems to be you know, the way other people can produce lovely cursive script, right not clutching their pen in a claw in their hand and gouging so hard on the paper, it goes through three sheets. And that's more like Braille that you can mention, right? There's a lot of ways in which the differences that that manifests in disabilities of all types would seem to exclude anybody with a disability from participating in, in the category of beauty, right? Yeah, I think that's part of what the book gets out, as you're always already excluded, because the fundamental characteristics of beauty, the symmetry, proportionality, harmony, right, softness and sharpness, at the same time, the sense of pleasure it produces, and others are not things we can access, or so it is thought.
Yeah, well, and there's also the, the how I think there's also a very much a difference in terms of how we process the messages too. And that, you know, for me, it's the trouble of seeing hierarchy where you know, that the hierarchy of beauty was confusing to me. Right. Right. Like it was sort of like, but, but I mean, it's also on the other side is that you would I would often see things that other people couldn't understand is beautiful as being quite beautiful, right, which also made me weird. But not lumpy pumpkins do not know. But it's so it's
like your your sense of aesthetic judgment is also disordered that right yes, appreciate Some forms of beauty more than others. But that is not the the usual hierarchy, right? So like the things that you like or find beautiful are not things that other people like or find beautiful. And that it comes across as like your taste is less refined, right? Or you see things that other people don't see, which means that your eye is not sufficiently trained. Right. So there's I think that's right. I think there's a way in which that we engage in the determination of what is beautiful to us that is not recognized by others as constituting valid aesthetic judgments. And there are ways that we move in the world that do not seem to make us able, able to produce beauty. In our selves.
Yeah. Yeah. And yes, and I think that there's, you know, and then that we could even I could even extend that to my writing, right, where I, you know, have have trouble following certain genre conventions, and maybe it's beautiful, maybe they're not beautiful, John, I've never been known for my beautiful sentence construction, let's just put it that way. Um, I can write a lot. It's just not necessarily particularly beautiful. Not that that was ever my goal. Anyway, but, um, but so it's, it's really interesting thing, because I think that often we do feel excluded from it. And again, in that way, though, where, like, that's why I said it's like beauty adjacent, where it's like, I should, should I shouldn't I be doing this? Shouldn't I be participating in this should I be caring about what I wear, is that the other thing, right is also like the, like, I never cared really about what I wore. You know, which is another sort of sign of either lack of self care or lack of, it was just like, No, I actually just don't care. It's not, you know, I don't have any spoons for that. I like I want my spoons on other things. I don't like my I'm not spending my spoons on clothing. And what I get up to wear in the morning, that's not what I want to spend my spoons on. In that. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of that kind of thing where it's, it was again, how do I appear normal? Right? Should I be participating in these things? How do I how do I at least try to appear normal so that maybe I'll fit in? And don't look as weird? Or seem to be as weird? You know, which, which again, was almost impossible because I was like, highly chlorinated. You know, my hair was always gonna be wet and a mess, and I was always gonna stink like chlorine. And I was
like, well, you coming down the hall? Oh, no, they
totally Well, if they didn't hear me first, let's be honest. Let's be honest. Yeah. But and so it was that that interesting negotiation. Right, about like, thinking, you know, in both internalizing it, but not it, it gets is that sort of interesting. In between space, like in adjacent spaces is not completely excluded. Yeah. But also not being completely in. And I think that that's kind of an interesting, sort of neuro diverse slash invisible disability position, where it's like, you look like you should fit in, and you feel like you should fit in, but you don't?
Yeah, are you conflating like, a sense of social belonging or nonstick out adness? With the concept of beauty?
I think that there's, there's a piece of that, right? Like, it's, it's, um, not so much conflating it, but having it as a part of it. Right, right. Like, there's the, there's a, there's the big circle of social belonging, of which beauty is a piece of that pie. Right, there's, there's the beauty piece, and then there's the, like, social norms piece, and then there's the, you know, all of these kinds of different pieces that are again, you can't just cut that part out, but a clumsy metaphor, metaphor, but
the clumsy, clumsy metaphor for clumsy people, right? Yeah. So is your understanding of beauty than sort of limited like right now? Are you thinking primarily in terms of like, as attaches to bodies like a human subject being beautiful or a sweater on a person being beautiful? Or, you know, somebody having beautiful eyes? Is that kind of like, the the type of beauty, the concept of beauty that you're you're thinking of right now?
Well, it's a little bit wider than that though, because there's also like you were saying, like we're we just don't quite fit. And so it's like the kind of awkward where you know how you would see someone and maybe this is even more like you'd see a picture of someone or you read or even read someone that they've that's and then you actually met the person you You're like, you're not at all what I pictured. Or, or if you see someone, and then you finally meet them. And then it's like, you're not at all who I thought you would be in terms of your personality. Right? Right. Because there is there is, we're, we're not, I mean, there is the aesthetic beauty of certain bodies and body parts and all of that. But there is also you know, the fact that we're not as much as some people would want us to be, we're not just mannequins and so eventually we open our mouth or move our limbs, right.
Thinking like, like human subjects, right, like I am looking at on my window right now. And I'm kind of mesmerized because I just looking at it on a wall of trees, some of them are closer or further from me. And the the tree closest to me, the leaves are kind of lime colored, and they're lighter on the underside than on the top side. And they're kind of circular, and they're just kind of flapping like, like pilots on a dress right now. And then behind that is a much darker tree that isn't moving very much. And it's like a darker, deeper green. And then the one beside it is an Engelmann spruce, and it's kind of got a blue tinge to it. And I'm being completely overwhelmed by the kind of beauty of the way the colors and the movement are attached. Right. Like I I tend to fall into these, these holes of just being struck by something that is so beautiful the way I was sitting in front of the Art Gallery of Ontario on Sunday, I had a coffee I couldn't go in, right so to finish my coffee first I was like, I really want to go the art gallery, I'm gonna really enjoy it like well, I cannot enjoy it if I'm not caffeinated. But I cannot go in with a cup. So Alright, finally Mississippi, out here in the courtyard, and I sat in the courtyard and I was on a stool on bench and I was looking in front of me and the way that the city pavers for the sidewalk, lined up at a particular angle with the sort of agio pavers underneath a statue that was like a fabric, kind of giant statue of an elephant balancing on a ball. And it was the the textures and the way the lions came together was like hypnotic, and beautiful. But it was just a bunch of dirty gray paving stones. Do you know what I mean? Like and so those are things that don't count as beautiful. But they are right that there are ways that we can have an experience that you're like, Well, I you know, you go to weddings, we're like brides villas have, you know, if one petal falls off, one of the Fancy Flowers, or like one of the pinks doesn't match the other pink, it's like, heart attack. And that kind of beauty again, just really, really relies on this idea of total control. Yeah, and symmetry and perfection. And I think the author of the book was talking a little bit about going to the beach and the beach is like a cigarette butts in it. Right? Like you just, you don't want like you think of a beautiful pristine beach like the the sort of backdrops that you get through your screensaver. And there's never any people on them, right, there's never like a pop can they got dropped somewhere. There's not like somebody's like one flip flop they left behind, or someone hasn't dug unaesthetic trench to like, Bring water forward for the kids to play with. Right. So there's this other idea of beauty where everything sort of has to go, right, everything has to be controlled, and imperfect. And it is easy to get mad at our environment or the people around us or the situations that we're in because they've failed to conform to this kind of like, you know, sort of mathematically precise idea of like proportion and harmony and beauty and control and perfection that that sometimes a sidewalk with, like a million bits of chewed gum smashed into, it just turns into, you know, something that has a bit of roundness in it that it didn't have before. And there's a way to see beauty in that too, right? That things don't have to be perfect. To be beautiful. And I'm interested in that concept to like people don't have to be beautiful in their personalities. And people can talk louder than I like to hear them we and there's still something beautiful in the enthusiasm that you manifest when you're talking or the way you become so fully yourself even though it wouldn't be like oh, you know what, we should get that woman on the radio. Right? She's got such a beautiful voice. Do you know what I mean? And so there are there are ways of, of seeing things that might differ from what we've been told that beauty has to be always Yeah, right.
Well, I think and I think like, I know you can know the I have I have grow goo next to me my robot grow goo, but that in the back I have a print of, of what is a kind of abstract, chaotic rendering of Montreal balconies. spin and fire escapes, like Buncher. All is. Yeah, it's just a jumble of them. Now, a that got put there because this book shelf is reflective. And so during zoom meetings, people could see what was on my other screen.
Right here like your thank you please. Yeah, so
I had to put a I had to put something there, I already had this print, I didn't buy it special for, you know, it just moved from like, behind my desk to behind me. So there's no, but you know, and I know a lot of people who have come and said that they don't the you know, that it's too chaotic. It's too shambolic. It's too, like abstract in that sense. But for me, I think I think it's a striking reminder of my hometown. You know, just that that kind of in, you know, again, it's got the kind of faded now, because it's a print and probably haven't taken as good care of it, as I showed that the colors aren't as bold as they once were. But there, there's a nice, there's good tones to it. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that, and, and so that, yeah, so there are lots of different again, and I think that as people who are neurodivergent, you know that we there is enough that we have or can have more of a depreciation of that. Yeah, yes. Because we can, we can be mesmerized in a way that again, because we don't know what we're not supposed to notice. That's right. We don't know what we are supposed to be paying attention to. And so like, it's like your like your example on on the pavement. Right? Normal. Normal neurotypical people probably would not be looking at the ground in such a way. Right. And it would be it'd be like, staring off in the middle distance. Yeah. As opposed to, that becomes the focal point of my attention in that moment.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, yeah, so that's a kind of beauty that you can, you can see and things that maybe other people don't see, because of the way they're not looking, right. And so the piece of art, you're pointing out there, too. I mean, you think famously, a group of seven like goes out in the bush and paints lakes and trees and rocks, and, and they're welcome to Canada. Right? Like, the trees and rocks are easy to love. Because, you know, they're they're natural and they're just beautiful in and of themselves like that. There are there are other paintings that members that group made of like back alleys in, in urban centers, right, that that are seem to be grittier and uglier. Or you think about, you know, there's a theory about Impressionism and art, you know, this kind of like hazy, sort of, unfocused is also partially a response to industrialization both the ugliness of industrialization, but also to the fact that you couldn't see very fucking far because of smog. Right? So there are there are impressionistic, like, I think Sargent does some of, of you know, London Bridge, and these sort of urban scenes in London that look like smog, actually, but it's, it's beautiful when you start to paint it, right. And I know the the comics artist, Robert crumb, one of the things he was famous for originally is like all of his urban scenes are just chock a block full of utility poles and power lines. And this kind of like, like this in an elegant, ropey detritus and infrastructure everywhere, like streetcar tracks and wires overhead and things are stuck here and a manhole cover there and like 50 buttons on this one post and, and that's sort of meant to be understood as unworthy of aesthetic attention because it is too sort of frenetic. It has too much detail and it's the ugly stuff but but that is the environment we live in like we're not sitting in a canoe, right? And like, what would become Algonquin Park contemplating, you know, the sunset as we're devoured alive by mosquitoes, wood, we're mostly living and walking around in in urban spaces that have utility poles and advertisements stuck everywhere and, you know, houses that were built roughly at the same time, but with no plan to aesthetic harmony, so that the balconies are all a slightly different color and all six inches higher or lower than all the other balconies around them. And some of them have clothesline stuck out of them. And we can, we can be mad and say like it's ugly. Or we can look for the patterns and the cemetery and deal with the reality that we live in and try to find the things that are beautiful unit, right. And I think it's, it's the same with people. It's the same with people as we could expect, you know, I could go into class and expect that all of my students are are going to come in having had, you know, exactly the same courses before they got to mind having the same disciplinary backgrounds having the same you know, travel experience as in the same set of like, cultural references that I want these to be easier to teach if they were all the same and it would be consistent and I would think like, well, I can, I can teach more. If everybody's starting from the same place we can go there together. They're a bit it always seems like a sort of Whack a Mole chaos where I never quite know what's happening until after it's already happened. And I could spend the rest of my life wishing that I had more control over everybody around me so that I could really finally get something done. Or I could realize, like, every day, I'm getting something done in the chaos, because that is where I am. And I mean, there's a reason that, that fascist art styles are like sort of this heroic realism, they take the weirdness out of art, right, immediately, like, that's what what, you know, the big art purchase in Nazi Germany we're about was getting rid of the interwar art, getting rid of Bohemian art, getting rid of weird stuff, getting rid of, of things that weren't just, you know, getting rid of Cubism, anything that seemed degenerate, because it did not sort of strictly depict a utopian ideal of control and harmony, and aesthetic, sameness for everything, right? And what would it mean if we, you know, went to an art gallery and looked at pictures of like, I posted one of these on my Instagram last year, because it struck me as beautiful and nobody liked it. But we have like a lot of pros congregate here, like we get the massive like, like, packs of crows like 1000s 1000s, right. And they're like in my neighborhood, and you can hardly see it. And because they're just calling and flying everywhere. And when they congregate around the tree, you'd want to see what the sidewalk looks like the next morning, right?
Like a photo of like one paving stone last year that just had so much multicolored bird shit on it. It it kind of looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. And yeah, it was like, beautiful in a weird way. And I was like, yeah, look at it. And I took the photos, it was like perfectly flat. Right? Like I did, like you would do like a flat lay outfit. Same where the the cameras perfectly parallel to the ground. So it looks like a canvas, right? It's out of its context. And I was just like, so struck by it. And I made it my phone lockscreen forbidden like, like, we have bird shit on your lockscreen. Like, look, it's beautiful. It looks like Jackson Pollock. But it was like birds. That did it right. But there are some things we're not allowed to see as beautiful because we've always already understood them as dirty or ugly or a mess or that needs to be cleaned. So it could look exactly the same as something we pay 30 bucks to get into a gallery to see but because it's out of its context, we're not allowed to see it as anything other than a problem. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think sometimes we treat people like that too. Sometimes, that okay, usually, that was an understatement for comic effect.
Yeah, no, I get it. Everybody on everybody listening to the podcast is like sometimes, sometimes what sometimes happens all the time to me. And I Yeah, and I'm not even sure. Like I said, I wanted to like explore it. I'm not even sure what point I wanted to make about it. But I think it's just, it's, you know, this is interesting. And again, I'm also aware of it now that I'm, you know, I'm making my own clothes. Yeah. Right. And people say, Oh, that's a beautiful dress. I'm sort of like it, but for me. Like, I don't know, I've never I've never felt and maybe this is internalized, but also are just like, it's it's nice. It's comfortable. Um, I don't know if it's beautiful. You know what I mean? Like it's in I don't know if there'll be the like, maybe it's just hyperbolic and we just use the word willy nilly, which yes, that's probably it, but, but it's just interesting sort of thing where I've put on an outfit. And I'm like, Yeah, I like this. You know, it looks good on my body. I don't look like a you know, like a weirdo. It looks like it fits pretty well. But I also don't care about perfect fit. Um, you know, and I'm comfortable in the prints kind of nice. Like, I'm wearing a t shirt dress that I made on a tiny lawn Liberty fabric. And, you know, I think I think the print is least Violets are lovely.
But, you know, the corn in a field of lavender.
They have a little bit yeah. But, but it's so it's this interesting thing where like people will, especially when they hear that I've made it which is really interesting, right? Like, if I bought it off the rack. I'm not sure what anybody would say about it. But like, as soon as they hear that I made it. It's like, Oh, that's beautiful. I'm like, really? Okay. Yeah, like what
if it sounds like you have a really you have an understanding of beauty that that feels almost coercive, aspirational and intellectualized right Like there is
that sounds about right for an academic, PhD.
So like, there are things that are beautiful, that we can all agree constitute right? The apotheosis of the concept of beauty. And then everything is measured against that, like, what if? What if beauty had aesthetic or sensory or emotional components to it? Right? Like I love cashmere sweaters, I think they're beautiful because I just, I just running my fingers on my cashmere sweater right now. Like, the way it feels when I rub my fingers on, it gives me this zing of pleasure. That is, that is not functional, right? Like, there are a lot of kinds of sweaters that would keep me warm, right. But cashmere sweaters to me are like a sensory pleasure. That is just the very top of Maslow's hierarchy for me, you know, like, it's not, it's not meeting any need other than my own sense of joy in the world, right. And, you know, something beautiful, you know, for some of us is a vocal stem, like with a phrase that you can't sort of stop repeating to yourself, because it feels good in your mouth when you say it. And it feels good in your ears when you hear it, and you get this little pop up. And it's like, like the way a poem can be beautiful, just because of the way it sounds when you say it, right. And even the most sort of ridiculous or prosaic of topics in a poem, there's something about the language, even if it's the same word you use all the time that that makes it beautiful, right? So beautiful, can be an experience that you have, and no one can tell you, then that something that you find beautiful is not beautiful, right? Unless we have this. I mean, this is such a thing. Probably for neurodivergent, people who've been told over and over how they fail to meet standards of all types and their own judgments can't be trusted about anything that we don't even know what beautiful things are right? A lot of autistic people like to flap their own fingers in front of their face, because it produces a kind of visual illusion that kaleidoscopes the light around you. And it's very soothing. Like it's very soothing and beautiful to look at. You know, I like to look at the patterns of light that are made by the various reflective surfaces in my house as I as I move around, and, and I just think the way the light can carve a shape onto something that otherwise does not have that shape is beautiful for me, and I will just stop and I will, I will stare at it. I think it's beautiful the way sometimes one shirt goes with a pair of pants, and it produces a kind of combination of colors that somehow makes me feel warm inside. Right, those things are beautiful, who could take that away from us. Sometimes I hear a song and I try to sing along with it. And I don't have a good singing voice like at all by any means. It's it's very terrible sounding voice. But when I can hear myself make a harmony with the melody. To me, that's beautiful. Even if my voice isn't beautiful, I can hear the way the notes resonate with each other. And I think we can all access beauty like that if we allow ourselves to understand our own sensory experiences of pleasure in the face of something that has no use value. Right? Yeah. That that is just nice, like ugly things make me angry. I think like probably one of the reasons I still like sticking with Mac computers all the time. It's I just think they're beautiful to look at. Yeah, they're like, less ugly than like, my husband has this Dell computer, the plastic feels cheap. When I touch it, the fan makes a lot of noise. It's covered in stickers. It's just It offends me, it's like hard for me to be happy when I'm near that computer, because I just think this was designed by people who hate being happy. Right? It wasn't necessary to like suck all the joy out of life with this case design. And yet somehow they've managed right? That there are ways that the taking a minute to just really enjoy the things that I think are beautiful. refills my bucket bucket. It does like that's probably one of the reasons I play piano so much during the day when I'm enraged is because like I can be enraged when I start on like finding the smashes chords to play so I can get it out of my system. But then at a certain point I start really listening to the noises my fingers are making and then I try to optimize it and then sometimes it'll just hit something. I'll be like, That's so beautiful. I forget how to be angry. Yeah,
right now, you know, like, what would it mean for you, Lee if you just chucked out that idea I mean, because because what's been described in the book is easy. Beauty is like that kind of receive beauty of rules and symmetry and hierarchy and proportion and Harmony, like and all of those sort of classical things that I suggest are fascist in the same way that like the people who get enraged when you suggest to them that, you know, all those beautiful classical statues that are white marble used to actually be painted colors, right? And they're like, No, that makes them less beautiful, less pure, right? There's a way in which this idea of beauty in the way we tend to receive it is, is really reductive. Authoritarian and coercive, and things like, like race, and it's really there's ideal, right? Yeah, I mean, a lot of the worst, you know, kind of like phrenology and like race science was based on like, this person's body is not beautiful, right? Therefore, they are not as close to God as those with with more beautiful blonde, but whose sense what's beautiful or what's not my kid used to regularly come into my room in the morning, climb into bed with me and chew on my elbow skin. I am not fond of the fact that I have enough skin on my elbow that you can pull it away from my arm and chew on it as a Kleenex. Right? And I was like, I don't I would like feel gross about an elbow skin. But I thought like, you know, this kid loves me so much. And chewing on my elbow skin, brings them comfort. I am the comfort object. And they think that I am beautiful. This is something beautiful, right? Again, that's weird. So a kid chewing on my elbow skin is beautiful, but it kind of was right in my mind. The initial idea there was like, Oh God, gross, like, you know, beautiful people don't have elbow skin you can pull out again, that's Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, elbow skin, you can pull far enough away from your elbow that it might as well be in a different room. Right analysis. Flat is a piece of paper. And, you know, because it's the elbow II part. It's like, there's very good for chewing like a like a piece like a chew toy for a dog like a pig's ear for a dog that was basically like, like what we had going on. And I found it really offensive. At first, but then I thought, no, it's kind of beautiful, because it's something about my body that my kid finds comfort in and loves because they can interact with it in a certain way. Right? You have your dresses are beautiful people find them beautiful. They, they like the fabric or they're so impressed that you make garments for yourself that you are obviously happy to be wearing. Right? Your garments are not coercive on your body. You don't you don't make garments you don't want to wear right you sew things that?
Well, sometimes I do because I've made a mistake, but you made
a mistake. coercing yourself like you're just I hear you you're downplaying your own accomplishments again. Like, I don't know, like I made it well enough. And it's like, it's beautiful. I mean, that's sort of that sounds like not like, bah, bah, bah, blah, right. But maybe it's the way that you look comfortable in yourself when you're wearing it. That is the combination of the garment that you've made and your effect while you're moving through the world in it. That it has a vibe that people find beautiful, because you're comfortable in your own skin, and you're comfortable in your clothes and your clothes are an expression of your own aesthetic and sensory desires. You had control over all of that and like did you like double surge at the seams or whatever? No, because you don't give a shit about that right? And maybe like something that's like my surgery
scares me.
Yeah, your surgery. My surgery scares me. I urge you know quite the way it would have been if you'd wanted to sew it like a little bit flatter but but maybe your vibe when you wear it is attractive to people in the sense that this is a person who seems happy in this garment, and they just want a piece of that. And maybe that's what people see is beautiful.
Yeah, that's that's a good point. I mean, I yeah, I never I didn't think of it that way. And so you didn't know. Well, it. Is it you? Yeah. Well, it's interesting too. So we have my grandmother painted. Yes, she did oil paintings. I may have talked about that before I probably have or, and so we I always grew up with a lot of and even before she was even before she was she went back to painting. We still had art in our house paintings, lots of paintings in our house and then it was like slowly, completely taken over my my grandmother's art, which makes sense. And then you know, I was I went to I went live the first apartment I lived in with my roommates. There was her art up on the wall. I was like the only you know 20 year old with like, Fine, not fine or like, like, yeah, like not the prince of like. I've got a print of Starry Night I have a printed The for dancers where they go, you know, no, I there was actual, you know, oil paintings and the kid my kids have always grown up with my brothers photography. You know, my grandmother's paintings, even some of my mom's paintings, she painted for a little bit too. And so it's this really? Like, I don't know, it's sort of like, I guess it's like, I feel like that's beautiful. Right, I think those are really beautiful. I just so close. I think that there's and that's an a kind of an internalized hierarchy of well, as well of like, what kinds of things like you said, are allowed to be beautiful. And what kind of art is allowed to be beautiful paintings are beautiful. You know, the making clothes is not, you know, and then there's a gendered aspect to that as well. I'm very sure. But it's just it's it's again, it's, it's always, it's always bothered. No, yeah, I guess bothered me, this might be a little too strong word, but it's always been sort of like, everyone in my family is created beautiful things. Mm hmm. It was my grandfather did like beautiful woodwork. And so I've got his woodwork, you know, beautiful jewelry box that he made me and. And then and then I'm always like, that, never really got to do any of that stuff. I'm not good at any of that stuff. I'm not good at, you know, like, I don't have good fine motor skills. I'm not, you know, I don't either, I don't care about like, perfectly, perfectly laid corners, which is also important, doesn't like stab me. But
absolutely have to listen to this audio book, then leave because you are in the trap of the easy beauty right? The trap the easy beauty, like a sunset, a Renaissance painting, right? Like, you know, your grandmother's painting is that things that are always already accepted as manifesting skill and intention in their execution, as well as like all of those qualities of beautiful objects that I've been listing repeatedly. Right? And yeah, and what you see in your own efforts is like, kind of chaos, misdirection and good enoughness, right. Yeah. As if those things cannot also be elements of beauty right? There are there are ways in which we like so we joke often about how our aesthetic preferences you and I, how we like our workspaces, how are quite different from one another. But there's something like beautiful and touching in how you have organized the things that you love around you, in order to feel comfortable. And it produces a location in which you can smile, genuinely, because you feel safe, right? And there's something something beautiful about that to about, about somebody who hacks their environment, so that they can stay there and be comfortable and produce things or it's a marker of their individuality and a space and even if it's like, not an environment or like yes, I would like that in my home. Like sometimes we think of beautiful things or like we can see something as beautiful things like well that I must have it like that's not true. I see. I don't want gum on the sidewalks of my house kind of thing, right? And enjoy it for what it is in its context is beautiful manifestation of like human activity, or like it's a weird circular pattern inside something that's a square like bird poop can look like a Jackson Pollock thing. It doesn't mean like, Let's never scrape bird poop off the sidewalk. Like it's not that like, you can be transcendent. And also just temporary, like, yeah, temporary right at the same time. And and, and so the things that you make are kind of like a beautiful expression of like, the great amount of zeal and energy you bring to things like I knit and that's slower, right? Like I'm knitting a sweater like I'm still knitting a sweater for time, it's going to have taken me an entire year to knit it because it's that complicated. And I'm enjoying that task. It's like doing a Sudoku on the hard level, right? Because you can do a lot longer, different kinds of joy and you have a lot more energy than I do in general and you like slam together like three dresses in one weekend when the mood strikes you and you have a kind of better you're like Jackson Pollock, you're making these paintings fast. Or there's something about the energy and dynamism right of doing something quickly, right and good enough and on a whim just produces something that's can be incredibly lively in a way that something much more ornate and and planned out has a different kind of beauty to it right? But it's almost like in the culture that we live in. That our concepts of beauty do not allow for different types of beauty to exist it like a sensory beauty. I like the way it feels or I like the way it smells or like I like it just visually I don't want it smell the bird poop and I just want to see, rather have a photograph of the bird poop than the bird poop or, you know, like, you know, Lee's messy office is like just this beautifully encapsulated expression of Lee's personality that I feel like she's here with me when I look at her things, right? Is the kind of beauty that doesn't mean like, do they sell out somewhere because I like, you know, I want to go by that.
I'll be an interior designer,
and be an interior designer, right? Like, it's it's funny, people have been coming to our house. We had some friends over this weekend. And they they look around the house of like, oh, like, Do you have a design? I was like, No, it was me. And like, it's really, like beautiful. I really liked it. I was like, what took me a long time to figure out the things that made me happy. And I had to learn how to listen to little voice inside my head that was like, Yeah, you need an emerald green wall, like you need it. That's going to be cool, right? And so the people that, that come and admire my decorating do not want their houses to look like mine. They do. They don't want to live in it. But they can appreciate it as a reflection of, of my personality and suited to the space that I am in. Right. And so maybe the difficult part of difficult beauty is that it is in the eye of the beholder, but sometimes it's in the vibe of the beholder. Sometimes it's in the inter relation of the object and its context. And and I think it's unfair, that we've developed this idea of beauty, both that we all know exactly what it is in the same ways at all times, which is very simple. You know, a more symmetrical face is more beautiful than a less symmetrical face. For example, like that would be classically the way to go. Except as as it turns out, none of us have symmetrical faces, which is why it's so off putting when you your camera reverses your image back, right, you take a selfie, and you're used to what you look like your selfies, which is a mirror image of yourself, which is the image you see of yourself when you look in the mirror. That's why it's so alarming. Sometimes it's the actual photographs of ourselves because our faces don't look, the way that we get used to them, right. Like we're all asymmetrical. He used to really bother me like, because you know, I have a clubfoot right, which means my feet are my joke is like if my feet washed up on the shore in Vancouver island somewhere, you know, because that sentence from the beach where feet washed up on the shore for various reasons we won't get into here, but I could explain as I don't sleep asleep now actually. My food if Yeah, both of my feet came up on the on the shore separately, they would start to different murder investigations because the feet do not look as if they belong to the same person at all right? They just don't they're one is a completely different shape, different size different with my calves are different sizes, and different widths. And it's something that I've been very self conscious of, for most of my life, you know, thinking like, I can't wear these types of skirts, because then people will see that my legs are different sizes, or I can't wear these kinds of shoes. And I'm really mad because like, these are beautiful shoes, and people should be able to wear these shoes in order to be beautiful, and I can't wear them because of my stupid feet right? Below like maybe that's not really what matters. Like it's really useful when I always knew as a kid, which side was my right side because that was my bad like, right? Like it was my great. I know there's like easy ways that it doesn't require a physical deformity to have a cheat code to figure out your left from right, but like,
but that's another thing that people with ADHD are really bad at.
Yeah, that's true. It's true. We
are terrible at knowing our love for more, right? It is awful.
Don't take a yoga teacher training because in yoga teacher training, they teach you how to mirror right. So I would say oh yeah, of course and lift your right hand up right and I'm lifting up my left hand it took me forever I had to write left and right on my head to right left on my right hand and right on my left hand so I could get that right for a long time. And now I actually don't know anymore which side is which so I actually do use my club foot to remind me to remind me what what my right
side I just start wearing a watch again. So I remember what my left hand was.
There you go. There you go. My husband wears his watch on his right hand he's a monster. Honestly, anyway, left handed though. No, he's not he wears it really low down on his wrist as well which drives me crazy but then again like his wrist is not as bony as mine because if I push my watch that far down on my wrist every time I bend my hand I get stabbed by the Crown, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Right. So another thing about beauty like you know, this problem of my club foot is like when I was growing up, and as I have grown up, I know that club footedness is a marker of monstrosity in in things right, like so. You know, Thaddeus Stevens portrayed as the villain in birth of a nation that has a very pronounced clubfoot, right. Like there's lots of villains and sort of movies and depictions of you know, you've got a clubfoot, which means like you are a physically hideous person and a hideous moral character. I mean, it was quite a bit advanced English studies before I learned that Byron had a clubfoot writer we like to think of Byron as someone who's like, dashing and a ladies man, you know the romantic poet climbing to the tops of mountains and writing man Have heard and shit like that right? And it's like, oh, he was disabled is the same disability is mean it was so shocking to me that someone is sort of understood to be beautiful, right? In those ways, had the same physical deformity as me, but then not surprising that it took me so long to find that out because it's not like he was a beautiful man. And he had a clubfoot. Right. It's like, yeah, it's one or the other. You're discussing one or the other. Right? And so our notions of beauty in that way are are very coercive and ablest and racist and elitist, and that they seem to require education. Like you can't, you can't enjoy Doritos, right? But you can enjoy like the Haute to read Oh, that's like artisanal Lee made at a restaurant where it's gonna cost you like $60 to get one artisanal burrito. Right, that there's has to be something. I mean, easy beauty, in that sense is almost a difficult thing to do. Because it requires so much aesthetic and intellectual training and sensory self discipline, in order to be able to appreciate beauty the way we are told. It has to be appreciated, right? Not like bird shit on a sidewalk. Anybody can see that. Right? Not like a 10 dress like a lot of compliments this week as at a conference and a swearing. What my sister calls them business parachutes, right. It's like basically a moo, moo. And everybody was loving my business parachute. And I was like, Look, it was $35 at at h&m. And it's a business parachute because I could have a whole other person inside this dress. And no one would ever No, no, no, no. doesn't show anything of my body. And it's like a weird length and it like it's just it's it's like a parachute. And but everybody loved it. It made people smile when they saw it. And I think it was because I was so happy. Yeah, when I was wearing it. Right. It's there's so comfy. It's so comfy. Right? So comfy. So So what a typical beauty is easier, right? In the sense of difficult duties and things that we're not supposed to find beautiful. But maybe it's things that we never allowed ourselves to acknowledge, as producing the sensations that beauty produces in us of like delight. Right? Or, or pleasure or, or calm. Right, looking at that bird shit on the sidewalk honestly made my whole day. Yeah, it did. I think it was just it. I was so struck, when I looked at it, you know, by this sort of like resonance of abstract expressionist painting, which is like one of my favorite kinds of painting. And I'm glad I did not deny myself the opportunity to experience pleasure in that because I didn't talk myself out of it being beautiful. Right? How much do you talk yourself out of things being beautiful. We
I think I've just stopped thinking about things in that way.
Right? So right, it
was just sort of like me that there are still things like I love going to art galleries and all I can you know, when we were in Montreal, there was a full moon and it was super clear. And it was right by the water. And like, huge. And like I was I pulled over with the kids in the car. I was just like we're pulling over. This is too painful. Like, we're gonna try to take a picture, although it doesn't work on your phones take pictures of the moon. Because there's still not very good at doing that. So yeah, like it's it's, it's all all. I guess I still do notice the easy beauty.
Yeah, but even that like sunset shot, right?
Yeah. But I it's so funny because talking about it is reminds me of a story that I've told before is, you know, it's again, growing up in the 80s I was allowed to walk to school by myself. And I guess it was probably first grade. And that they had to get me a watch. Because didn't matter how early they they they made me leave the house. I was always late for school. Right? And I but I can tell you with with like vividly, like what like what I stopped to do and that like because people had flowers in their front yard and I stopped admire the flowers and there there was one tree I still remember this tree and it was cool. I thought it was like I called it the computer tree because like one side of the leaf was really dark green, almost black, but the other side was white. And when the wind would blow it looked pixelated.
So Silver birch probably probably because the underside of the leaves are quite a different color than the top sides of the leaves. It's beautiful. It honestly
and I would stand there I knew I mean, I didn't know I know it was probably 15 minutes, but like I would stand in front of that tree. Yeah. mesmerize, mesmerize, it's like loving it and I would stop and just like every single like I had to stop at every house and admire like something about it. And then I got a little pink Timex where it was like you had to be. Yeah, you'd No, no, it was it was analog because my parents wanted me to learn how to read a clock. Like if they were not getting me a digital watch that it was a pink plastic Timex. Yeah. And I had to be at school before the big hand was on the 12. And the little I was on the nine.
Yeah. Like, look so because I mean, one of the things we know about people with neuro divergence is that we see things differently than other people, we notice things that other people don't notice. We feel things are bumpy socks classically that other people don't feel we are highly tuned, right to sensory input. And it's true that there are a lot of artists who are I mean, this is sort of like famously the like, do you have to be mentally ill to be a famous artist, and some of that is, you know, is about like psychosis or delusions or manic energy or what have you. But But often it's, it's about neurodivergent people notice things that other people don't notice. And don't know that they're not supposed to notice them. Yeah, exactly. Right. But not they don't notice that they're not supposed to find it beautiful, right. And, and I think that is such a gift that if of anyone, you would think that the neurodivergent people, you know, with our quote, unquote, sensory issues would be the best place to decide what is beautiful, and what is not. Right. But we've just been so often told it that everything that we prefer, and everything we like, and everything we notice is like wrong, right? Yeah, that we that we don't, and what would it feel like? I mean, this would be a great mindfulness practice for for all of us is just to stay attuned to those unexpected moments where things are beautiful, either like, it gets real quiet in the space, all of a sudden, you hear something you never heard before. Or, like as you're walking through the park, you can't you can't see the flowers, but like it smells like flowers, like it just like what if we stayed a little bit open to that? Because I know we noticed those things like we we noticed them at some level. And we've just got so used to suppressing all of the sensory input that that impacts our ability to focus on the task we get our pink Timex is of our brain, right? And we tell ourselves to stop being distracted. But what it's like in some cases being distracted if you stop to, to watch the leaves flicker on a tree, what are those distraction, but actually mindfulness, right, you're being in the present moment there. And, and I think that's a really beautiful thing. Like it's, it's easy to notice a sunset. They're beautiful, right? Yeah, they're beautiful. It's harder to notice bird shit on the sidewalk. And sometimes it's hard to accept that there might be something about the way that we're moving through the world that prompt other people to tell us there's something beautiful, there, we don't, we don't want to see that. Or we don't sometimes let ourselves by, by the jacket with a nicer leather that feels like butter every time we touch it, because we think that's just an extravagance, right? Like, you know, you could get this other jacket that's like $30 cheaper, but it doesn't make us happy to look at you know, it's like purchase some things that every time I look at them, I'm just like, I'm so glad I brought it just makes me happy. Every time I look at it, and that sort of feeling of joy is is about a kind of beauty that resonates with us, you know, I I've been drawing because you know, I'm like trying to get better at drawing and it helps to draw body parts. I mean, that sounds gross when I say but like, you want to learn how to draw human figures like body parts and like feet and hands are notoriously difficult to draw. And so because other people won't sit around while I stare at their toes, I've been drawing my own feet. And I've been drawing my busted up foot a couple of times. And I'll tell you, when I go back to those drawings. And I have looked, I have this spark of recognition where the thing that I've drawn actually really looks quite a lot like my foot, and nobody else's foot. And I kind of have this moment of love where I see my own foot there. You know, the foot that I've spent my whole life trying to hide from people that I've like kind of hated that my mom was like always surveilling I turn your foot out, turn your foot out, like don't turn your foot in when you walk you have to do your exercises turn your foot out or like I and a lot of these pictures I'm drawing of my own foot because I'm just at rest my foot is turning inward because that's naturally where it goes because ligaments and and and I've drawn it in that position I was never supposed to love it in and that there's something about my drawing that I enjoy that I made that drawing and there's something that I enjoy about I have captured so well. The essence of what that food actually looks like in the wild. That sounds really weird to say
no, no, it's but it's also a reclamation to Yeah, what you've done is you have I mean you have recreated in a excess acceptable artistic form. Yeah, what was what is or wasn't still isn't a lot of cases considered. You know? not worthy of that subject. Right? Yeah, that's right. And so you've you've, you've reclaimed it. And again, it's it's sort of weeks still gives up. But representation matters. And so you've created your own representation of it. And you're going to show it to me. There's my foot. Oh, that's awesome. Thanks. Do I need to take a screenshot? Should I take a screenshot? Okay, I'm gonna take a screenshot because I also think that our backgrounds are perfectly encapsulate our personalities as well. There you go. Yeah. All right. Finally, we'll finally have art for the show.
And it's my foot a line Dragon by foot, like so my sister has always like, Oh, God was triggered. I'll send her pic because she hates feet. And I said, I was like, I did a drawing today. She was like, oh, yeah, what do you do? And I sent her picture. She's like, Yeah,
yeah. Right, like, and I bought a pumpkin today. Oh, so
I always put the like I put the date. What I'm doing is it's like my, it's on a eating tablet that I'm drawing. It's like a sketchbook for me. And I date all the drawings. So I can see the progress I'm making. And I that one was from the 19th of August. And I've labeled it with a quote feat only a mother could love because even as I was drawing it, I was conscious of like, I almost had my mother's eyes looking through my eyes as well like telling me to turn my foot or to not to not draw it like that. And that was how she described my feet feet, only a mother could love you. So clearly not. Not beautiful. But there was something beautiful about learning how to draw it in a way that actually captured it accurately. And that was fun. I like it my hands to a very bony, like weird looking. And I drew my hands as well. And it was something very pleasurable about being able to represent it in a way that if you saw it, you'd be like, well, that's a nice handle. Like my friend, Megan. I posted a picture of one of my hands I drew and she's like, I would recognize that wrist own anywhere. Right? Yeah. I then she said that I was like, oh, yeah, that's weird. I do have a really very large and prominent wrist bone. I'm gonna sound like such a freak to people on the podcast, you'd be very surprised when you need me. I'm not a monster, but, and I wrote back to her right away. And I was like, Yeah, you don't have any bones in your wrist. Like your wrists are so tapered and narrow because like I could see her wrist as clearly in my mind as I could see my own because we've just spent so much time together and we're so close right now is like, you have no bones. In your wrist. You have an impossibly narrow forearm and she's like, yep. And I was like, like, there's something beautiful and having that kind of intimate knowledge of, of somebody else's body to note that there's a thing that if I saw that it would make me think of her and that would be it would be happy. Right? To me. That's That's beautiful. Because it's there's more than just like, a sort of Vitruvian Man. Mathematical symmetry to it. Right?
I I had, I had a boyfriend in college. Once boyfriend's college but won't go down that road. I have my friend in college who when he was a toddler, small child, he pulled a pot of boiling water. Oh, off of that, and burns. Oh, yeah. burned his whole back. Yeah, just like and so it's scarred. Right. And it's grown and it's stretched. And I thought it was beautiful. Yeah. I thought like just the distinctiveness and the patterns of it. And just, you know, the even the feel of it. Like it was just, I thought it was beautiful. And of course, he was heavily embarrassed and mortified by it. You know, like, yeah,
see with your dresses, we Yeah, somebody is fighting an authentic aesthetic joy in you in your dress, and they really feel it and you're like, No, don't write just like your your boyfriend had a scar representing an injury that is a physical difference that he's ashamed of the way you know, I have a physical difference that I have often tried to hide, too because we are ashamed of the difference even if other people authentically find it beautiful because they love us. Right? And it's like the part of the texture on the scar gives you a sense of connection to him and you associated with the good feelings that you have with him and like my elbow skin, it is a comfort object for you. It is something that you recognize and and then when you touch it you feel happy and when you see it you feel love than to you it is beautiful. And it's so rare that we can produce feelings of beauty and others why do we deny them that when it happens? Right like why? Yeah, when someone's like, you know this beautifully, like no? Yeah,
is it more or I guess so.
I guess so. Like okay, weirdo. Like you must need new glasses. Oh, Ah, right or like, whatever it is like the self self deprecating. What would it mean? instead? It's like, if someone points out something about us or our things or our words, or whatever it is, that's beautiful to them. Like what would happen if we tried to see it? Like the way they see it would not be better than try to steal their joy away from them is to try to call it to probably,
probably, it would probably be better. Yes. So there's your homework, everyone. There's your homework, we're giving you homework. No, but I do actually have to end this. I have to go pick up my daughter in two minutes. So I'm gonna be late did that but that's okay. No, it's fine. That's not a big deal. She's, she's going though, I gotta tell it, it's there. You have a she has helped. I've taken her health that are under normal high school. But they have a VR simulator this week that simulates drunk driving. So that's what they're doing. That's what she's doing this afternoon when I go drink go getters. Wow. Yeah, so that'll be great. Yeah. So thank you so much for listening, everyone. And stay beautiful. Yes, indeed. And we will not be taking another three week hiatus. So we'll be back next week. We sure will, and we'll take care of we'll see you next time.
