A rather small but amusing incident occurred today. When I got off an MRT, on the way home, I saw a flyer distributor somewhere down my path. Being the only person walking in his direction, both of us carefully did not look at each other, until I was within arms' length of him, where he stuck out a flyer and I, well, took it.

After reading several romance novels in one of my stranger moods, I have decided that nudity is overrated. Clothes hide all the flab that exist in the wrong places (for girls), (or for guys) fat that's supposed to be muscle. Those perfect breasts, well-defined chests with hard angular planes simply do not exist. Or perhaps more accurately, they form a minor enough proportion such that romance novels are written about them. This brings to light that Imagination is frequently better than the Real Thing. Not that i have any experience in the matter, but I suspect that in our world, most couples spend less time looking at each other and get down straight to, er, business.

In a nice long conversation with Lin Zi yesterday, we happily recapped some of the more ludicrous examples of romantic fantasy. One particular case that stuck in our memory was a fanfic detailing how, in a dark and stormy night, person A saw a blurred figure flashing by in the distance, who conveniently turned just before he disappeared so that his amethyst eyes could be observed. Under the conditions described, we all have to admit that those eyes must have been glowing as described by the author.

This brings me to my next point: it appears that attraction has surprisingly little to do with looks. After years of ridiculing my friends' choices, I mentally compiled a (dismally short) list of all the guys that I found marginally attractive in my short years, and come to the reluctant conclusion that my taste sucks too. Other than certain character traits or facial features that distinguish them (in my eyes) from the normal crowd, most of them are really amazingly ugly.

To the everlasting disgust of my conscious mind, I also identified a pattern among them--tall, skinny with relatively square shaped jaws. For some reason, the well-built, handsome variety merely inspires general appreciation equivalent to the experience of discovering a nice item in the shop window. This has led to the conclusion that there's really no accounting for hormones.

And (horrors and horrors), after all that criticism, I actually found the novels rather sweet.