Tuesday, September 26, 2006.

I'm running a flu now that it's two days to the promos.

Good going, Isabelle.

Did Maths mock paper 1 today and don't want to touch maths anymore. BLEH.

Did nothing else productive but read the GP questions and goodness... they are not easy.

I read through some of the schools' comprehension papers and there is one passage which I like.

It's adapted from "Beauty is in the eye of the beholden," by Brigette Aflalo-Calderon, Washington Woman, (June 2001)

I like the way these comprehension passages put my thoughts and opinions into words so apt that I can never string together. That's why I always find myself nodding or even smiling at the paper when I read these comprehension passages.

So, as we reflect on our beauty, it helps us to focus on what the media-driven obsession with youth denies us: the chance to fully experience each stage of our existence and see each step as having its own beauty.

I think this is very true. Media-driven obsession with youth really does deny women the true beauty they have and are able to exhibit. The part about fully experiencing each stage of one's existence is true for me, too.

Why should women be afraid of having white hair and see the need to dye it black immediately? Maybe because at this age I have no tendency to care about age catching up with me, but I don't see the point.

You are beautiful in your own way in your teens, in your 20s, in your 30s, in your 40s and even in your 50s. Each stage of life has its different kind of beauty so I don't think there should be a need to conceal which stage of life you are at ; there's nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about.

There is beauty in diversity, honesty in laugh lines, sensuality in curvaceous hips and character in hair that is left to its own devices.

I hold more respect for a woman who knows and acts her age rather than one who lives in self-denial about her age and tries on all sorts of ways and means to make herself look youthful.

I'll just look at you in disdain.

I think it's just vanity. Your wrinkles will still come, your features will still look less sharp, and people can tell that you are a middle-aged woman trying to act young. I just do not like to see women torturing themselves like that, and in Singapore, that's quite a common trend.

The Thais who have metal rings around their necks, the english ladies who lace corsets and the chinese girls and women who have their feet binded - I see this as tradition.

On the contrary, splurging on beauty products and going for cosmetic surgery is what I call vanity.

Being bimbotic is already bad enough, if you want to be labelled as utterly vain, I pity you.

There's also one thing I cannot bring myself to tolerate. Trans-sexuals.

URGH.

YUCK.

EWWW.

Outright disgusting.

Everytime I read any article about some idiot who goes for a sex change I seriously wonder what happened to the human race.

As if homosexuality in itself wasn't huge enough a headache already.

YUCK.

YUCK.

YUCK.

What's more, you have beauty pageants for these people.

PLEASE. They are artificial. It's in the artificial and superficial that you find beauty by world standards, cause they are made and changed and transformed to be beautiful.

But to use the word beautiful on them is a huge lie.

How can you call yourself beautiful when you do not respect the true beauty you were born with and instead go all out to change it? To make yourself much less beautiful when you were before?

Grotesque.

One more sentence.

It demands that we look honestly at the emaciated bodies of fashion models paraded before us by the media - like the child before the naked emperor - and recognise them as exploitative rather than enviable images of beauty.

I don't have much to say about this because it's crystal clear.

The media really knows how to propagate ideas that change us so, so, so much.

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