As I’m getting older by the day and (hopefully) getting more and more mature as well *wink*, my idea about sexy women has been slowly changing. I’m actually hetero-oriented, however, I find women interesting and I enjoy observing them; both their physical appearance and personality. We know that women are aesthetically more beautiful than men, that’s for sure (okay, please temporarily exclude those ladyboys), and personality-wise, women are a lot more complicated than men. Nevertheless, that is exactly what makes us, women, interesting.

The allegory of women and wine is surely not for nothing. As a teenager, I always adored those pretty Ms. Perfect cover girls and dreamt about being like one of them one day. In my then (too) simple mind I always thought how lucky they were to be born pretty, the world must be totally under their beautiful well-taken-care-of feet. It must be great to be surrounded by admiring guys and fun to play them between your finger tips. These kind of silly thoughts could even get me quite frustrated sometime, for what did world have to offer to that one girl in the crowd with her puberty pimples on her face? At that time, I felt that growing-up was really painful.

Fortunately, my brain and commonsense didn’t stop to grow.

Along the way towards maturity, I’ve seen a quite lot. Beside those cover-girl-pretty girls, I saw a lot of arrogant pretty girls, stupid pretty girls, materialistic pretty girls, desperate pretty girls, unhappy pretty girls, and a lot more types of pretty girls who now do not look as shiny and sparkling anymore. There I realised that they are actually not at all different than anybody else. At the same time I got to know some smart average-looking girls, intelligent average-looking girls, witty average-looking girls, mature average-looking girls, talented average-looking girls, happy average-looking girls, who are interestingly now look a lot more attractive than the first group I mentioned before, even though they are, hmm, just average-looking girls. So given these facts, striving to be pretty is no longer a priority in my life

Not that I am discriminating pretty girls though. I find Paris Hilton awesome. Especially her spirit of entrepreneurship . That (ironically pretty) girl really knows what she is doing. TV shows, publicity of her book, her own perfume line, a number of contracts for commercial spots, and I don’t want to know how much Juicy Couture paid her for wearing this funny-looking training suits in public! Yeah sure, it was just a co-incidence that paparazzi happened to be there. And my dad is the president of the United States.

Now I find that happy women with brain and personality are a lot more sexy and glamorous than those unnatural-looking women who strive their butt off to look pretty but ignoring the importance of being oneself and having a character. Nowadays it is very easy to “renovate” one’s look in any event; open the yellow pages and, voila!, you’ll find dozens of “aesthetic centres” for some nip & tuck work. But can you please tell me where to get an instant heavyweight brain and personality?

Not that I need it though. I feel sexy the way I am

~ Written for the first time in August 2006 ~

I’ve been taking a little bit of my time to ponder about relationship.

I guess we all agree that being in love is something wonderful, let alone getting into a relationship subsequently. The happy end “societically perfect” version of it is when the lovebirds then decide to get married, have one or two beautiful, doing-good-in-school children, have a secure job and therefore a stable income, retire after 65 years of age, in short, live happily ever after as a family.

However, not all couples endure that long. Why? Isn’t love supposed to unite and bring happiness?

Scott Peck (author of the best-selling book The Road Less Traveled) defines love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. In other words, loving someone demands a lot more than just saying “I love you”. Genuine love requires commitment, in which we are ready to work hard and learn lots of new (including the unpleasant) things for and in our relationship. Ready even when things get into our ego boundaries. Relationship is about two strangers with different personalities getting together, and it is not always easy to work through.

People fall in love and whether we like it or not, people could fall out of love as well one day; when the mating instinct and the excitement of falling in love have run their course. This could be exactly the momentum where genuine love begins. Sort of a cutting edge where we either face this displeasing fact and work through it, or we choose to break up because we don’t feel like spending time doing the effort. It’s our own call.

Since I fully understand that relationship is not something easy, I have nothing against break-ups and divorces. It’d be much better to quit in time rather than to drag the conflicts over the years since it wouldn’t do anyone any good. Ideally, both parties would have an equal amount of will to nurture and maintain the relationship. The way I see it, conflicts mostly arise when the effort is unbalanced; for whatever reason one gives or takes more than the other. For couples with kids, it could even cause unwanted consequences to the process of growing up, which could turn those innocent children into adults with some serious mental issues or even character disorders. Not so good for the world.

Regardless of my opinion about break-ups, still we should not give up easily once we come to the difficult point in our relationship. Try to work it out first before we make up our mind, for we all actually dream of having a loving, healthy, constructive relationship. Provided we have tried and it is fruitless, then break-up might be a good option. Equal take-and-give and a deliberate amount of sacrifices are important keywords in relationship. After all, we all have the same rights to achieve our own happiness, even if we therefore have to disembark the relationship boat and start anew.

Well, c’est la vie.