What is beauty?

     What is beauty? How do we define what beauty is? 

Is beauty based on culture or just basic common standards? Or is there such thing as "true beauty" where we can find in any cultures at any times? Are super models we see on magazines, television, and ads truly beautiful or are they just some artificial product for the campaign? 

To be honest, fashion media seeks models with slender figure because the same item of clothing worn by two people will generally look better on the more attractive one than the other. So does that mean all women need to slender down for attractive sake?

     We can start asking some questions and answer them by looking at different cultures and the times when beauty was defined. In today's era, the "thin" and "slender" body type is wanted by many female population. Many females define attractiveness and beauty based on how thin you can be. But was this true back in the days? According to some of my knowledge, the "curvy" or closer to "obese" was considered a truly beautiful woman in the Greek period. When we see paintings from those era, all the females are a bit chubby or....fat so called. 

     In the world today, within the cultures, there's a massive variation of what is considered beautiful. In some cultures, women with long necks are considered beautiful, ceramic mouths, and in the western society, the silicone breasts. When perspectives of culture changes, its standards of beauty changes as well. We can say that the epitome of 'beauty' can be decided as democratic rule. Whatever people happen to prefer. But there's more to this. Today's era base "thin" as the center of beauty but it's not true that every thin woman is considered beautiful. You can't say that the cover girl in Vogue has the same standard of beauty with people like we see in everyday life. So to compare the standard of beauty may be just depend on that person’s heart.

Perfect holiday

The ideal of my perfect holiday? I would like to introduce Minj’s ideal of “perfect holiday” in today’s blog. My first scenario is simple. Staying in my house, eating homemade delicious foods, watching the reruns of my favorite shows from season one. Do NOTHING all day long. God....sounds like heaven....It seems as if our world is running too fast in today’s world. Whatever we do, it seems as if its going in haste, not enough time to take in the beauty and pleasure. That’s why my perfect image of ideal holiday is staying in home, snuggled up in my blanket in my most comfortable pajamas, air con blasting, watching the already downloaded movies/TV shows/Korean Dramas with my mom. When it is time to eat breakfast, lunch or dinner, we simply order fast food quick service and continue watching.  My dream day / perfect holiday. What can overtop THAT?

My second scenario involves my parents and traveling around my country Korea with a single backpack. I’ve never really been on a “family trip” before in my life because my mom and I grew up in Saipan while dad was working at Korea. My ultimate goal this summer is to make dad take few weeks off of his work so we (mom, dad, and me) could go backpacking around Korea. That way, we could form our friendly family bond.

Last of all, my final perfect holiday would be meeting with my old friends and just hang out, laugh, talk, and share our old memories together. Because friendship is all we need. Friends to talk our problems with, be there for ourselves and just be there whenever we feel like low or just simply there even without any special occasions. 

These would be my three perfect holidays. 

Alice Metamorphosis

Since today’s blog is about free topic, I’d like to share someone very special and has some very special abilities to make herself look mental; Alice Lee. When I first met her at my junior year of high school, Alice came to Saipan and presented herself as a normal teenage girl. She was very quiet, preserved, normal, and non-talkative. Over the years, as I got to know her and vise versa. Some of her inner abilities came out like an alien coming out of that women’s stomach in the movie “Alien”. She taught us (our senior class) the important lesson of not to judge a person by the cover. She taught me that because the cover of the book is very fancy does not mean the content inside the book is also rich with ideas, beauty and normality of a human being. Alice has some very special qualities that makes people cringe with fear and worry. The way she constantly spaces out or the fact that she’s now painting her nail aqua green or obsessing over some soccer player brings us to question her sanity and level of her mental stability. Don’t get me wrong here. We....or I love her to bits, but it just struck me with such an awe and shock how the same person can change 180 degrees over a period of year. The once quiet, preserved Alice turned into an annoying, SO talkative, SO loud, SO bouncy, abnormally acting girl who jumps around all over the place, but then, I thought....that’s okay. As long as she continually gives me food, no matter how weird she gets, I can handle that. 

Decisions

     Making decisions are hard. Especially if you are young and need help from people around you. 

Younger people tend to ask parents or people around them for advice lot more than older kids. Even I 

ask my mom for advice before making important decisions. But how do we make decisions? Do we 

“follow our heart” like many people advice us to? Or listen to Mr. Lee by “following our logic”? He 

claims it is more safe and reasonable by listening to our brains than our heart. Question is, how would 

you make decisions? My parents always tells me to follow my heart. Mr. Lee tells me to follow my 

brain. 

     There are several factors influence decision making. These factors include past experiences, age, and 

personal beliefs. I believe the factors that influence the process impact the outcome. Past experiences 

impact our future decision making as well. I feel like when I made a decision in the past and resulted in a 

very positive way, I tend to make decisions to similar situations. On the other hand, I tend to avoid 

repeated past mistakes. There’s an old saying to learn from our mistakes. I guess that’s the answer to 

these situations. Maybe that’s why those influences cause them to rely more on previous experiences. 

     Basing from my experience, the hardest decision I had to make was in my junior high summer 

vacation. I had to make a decision between doing an internship in Korea or going to NYC for fashion 

program. I was really anxious, paranoid and eager because I didn’t know what to choose. Both seemed 

like a great opportunity for my future and to be honest, I was a little hesitant to do either of them. But in 

the end, I’ve realized that the decisions that we make depends on us. It is you who makes the decision in 

the end no matter whoever tells you what to do. 

What is good?

     How do we determine what is good? What can be defined as good? According to that bastion of superficial knowledge wikipedia, “good” can be defined as ‘That which is morally right; righteousness. To be desired or approved of.’ But then, what is moral? What is righteousness? I would like to take an example from my favorite professor Michael Sandals from Harvard. Michael Sandals asked his students ‘If you had to choose between killing one person to save the lives of five others and doing nothing, what would you do?’ What would be the right thing to do? What would be the correct moral reason to answer this question? It is a very vague question with no right or wrong answers in my opinion. Its like asking if I like my mom or dad more.

     If we had to look through Mr. Sandal’s point of view, we are by nature to take the easier side of the problem. He gives examples of scenarios where he ties family members, making it harder to give straight answers or conscious choices. He makes it difficult to tell what is right or wrong. To kill one important person by sacrificing 5 commoners or just sacrifice one to save the majority? There can’t be no relevant or correct answer to these questions, making the students think and to ponder about these situations. I guess its what it makes the lecture so popular in Harvard. 

     Based on my philosophy, I believe what is good depends on what the person’s action tells us. Many people say there’s no good or bad people in this world. Only the choices that those people make is what separates them into different categories of people. No baby was born evil. The influence they received growing up, the environment they lounged around in, and the people they associated with growing up has a major impact on the person and the choices that he makes. 

So what we determine does not depend on the person, it depend on the action of that person’s actions. But according to my mom, as long as we don’t harm the others, then you are goodly off to go. :)