If you haven’t seen the Dove Real Beauty Sketches video, above, watch it — it’s fascinating.
The video — which has sparked some controversy — suggests that women are unfairly self-critical about their appearance. They tend to describe themselves in a way that is much less flattering than others would describe them. Why? Could it be that women view themselves as being compared to some ludicrous standard of female perfection, and never quite measuring up . . . and therefore they downplay their own, true attractiveness?
Men don’t seem to have this problem. Most men don’t seem to think that they should look like the models seen in Abercrombie & Fitch ads. Why not?
Sgt. Pepper’s is generally viewed as one of the most influential albums ever recorded, and its lavish, beautiful cover fit perfectly with the music inside and the beginning of the Summer of Love. From the iconic front cover, with the Beatles surrounded by photos of famous people at a gravesite, to the lush and sparkling interior photo of the Beatles in the satin band uniforms (which is where the auctioned album is autographed), to the back cover of the song lyrics and a picture of the Beatles featuring Paul McCartney’s back, the Sgt. Pepper’s cover is a tantalizing treat for the senses. But $290,000?
America is a land of stressed-out worriers. We lose sleep over the latest epidemics and health scares, over diseases like SARS and bird flu, and over chemicals in our food and horsemeat in our tacos. We fret about gun-toting nuts charging into schools or gunning down innocent theatergoers and about rogue police officers on random killing sprees. We agonize about the prevalence of sexual predators and other sickos who might kidnap or molest our children. We brood about the bad economy, and whether we can keep our jobs, and whether the college graduates in our families will be able to even get a job in the first place.
I’ve never been in a hot air balloon, nor have I ever been to Luxor, where the fabulous Valley of the Kings is located. But, I could very easily see myself visiting Egyptian antiquities and being tempted to take a balloon ride that would allow me to get a bird’s-eye view of all of the sites. Such tourist options — like the opportunity to go parasailing in the Caribbean, or go skydiving, or engage in similar kinds of novel vacation activities — are so commonplace that we tend to assume that they are extraordinarily safe. But, of course, things can go wrong, and if they go wrong when you are in an unsupported balloon a hundred yards in the air the consequences are more likely to be devastating than if they go wrong when your feet are on the ground.
Benedict, who is 85, said he was resigning because he felt his strength had deteriorated. He believes that leading the Catholic Church requires strength of mind and body and concluded that his failing condition was leaving him unable to adequately perform his duties.
Those of us who are fortunate, and who don’t suffer from chronic depression, can’t possibly understand what it truly means to be depressed. It’s like a person who has known only perfect health trying to understand what it is like to live with constant, crippling pain. You can’t comprehend the life-changing impact of permanent pain until you personally experience sustained physical torment whenever you draw a breath. For the depressed person, the agony is just as real and just as unbearable.
Your wedding day is one of those days — like the day your first child is born — where the intensity and unprecedented nature of the experience deeply engraves every action onto your memory. Even after the passage of decades, you remember that day, still brightly lit in your brain cells, when the recollection of every other day before and since has dimmed and fallen away, lost forever in the fog of a lifetime of experiences. But your wedding day is, and always will be, special and distinctive.
What’s a year, anyway? It’s a rough approximation of how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun, marked according to a calendar decreed by a long-dead Pope. Logically, calendar years mean little. They help us account for the seasons, and plan our activities, and look ahead to when we hope it will be warmer — but that’s about it.
