Admiring Beauty

I had this weird realization when I was talking to BIG friends sometime ago. I told them I needed a lot of beautiful women to get over Natalie Portman getting engaged and having a baby. They asked me who and I named several at the top of my head, all of them Hollywood beauties who I like seeing onscreen. It doesn't matter whether they're in crappy movies. They're silly crushes, really. And BIG friends would remind me that Natalie is still my one great love and they're all just distractions to get over my heartbreak.

Funny how I can have so many women crushes, but very few men crushes. At the top of my head, I can only name two Hollywood actors. It made me wonder whether I'm straight or simply confused about my sexuality. Kidding.

I realized I don't easily admire people, not physically at least. One of the easiest way to turn me off is to have a headless, topless picture. No matter how ripped the body is, I look away. I admire people based on several factors, most of them go beyond physical attributes. Their outlook, their demeanor, their principles--essentially all the things that are invisible to the eye.

It's another puzzle solved. I used to wonder why I was never able to reciprocate someone's feelings for me years ago. He was tall; he looked good; he's got something between his ears than hot air and he did some very nice and sweet things for me. But try as I might, I couldn't feel the same way. There was something amiss.

And I realized now, some few years later, that there was something about him that, maybe, subconsciously turned me off. It was this: he lived way beyond his means. And I'm the kind of person who lives below my means. I earn and spend for my own, while he has a credit card that somebody pays for. He sees something he fancies, he swipes the card because someone's gonna pay for it. If I see something I want, I have to think whether I can survive on bread of salts for days. That was the disconnect, the kind of personality contradiction I couldn't reconcile with. I'm conscientious about my finances because I don't exactly have a fallback but myself. The last time I told my parents I don't have money, they laughed at me and told me that banks may run out of money, but not me.

Sometimes I get laughed at when I tell people that it takes time for me to develop a crush on someone. Like I need to process and assess things first before I decide. Even those Hollywood beauties I like, I like them after reading countlesss interviews and articles about them. It's not enough that they're beautiful. There must be something in their life that's worthy of admiration.