Culturally Aesthestic

Here's a topic I rarely touch on: aesthetics. I was holiday shopping with my mom at Sephora, a cosmetics store similar to ULTA. She was looking for a particular brand of perfume. I wasn't looking around for anything since I rarely wear makeup or care to search for any beauty products for myself. Naturally, this left me to observe the handful of young and old women employees. They were all in the same uniform: black dress pants and blouse, most with very high heels. Their hair was either straightened or curled, nothing was natural. Most lips were glamoured with various shades of red lipstick and their eyes heavily brushed with shadow and mascara.

Don't get me wrong- they all looked pretty. But that is the point of makeup, right? Makeup for women is supposed to lift self-esteem and enhance the face. But sometimes I wonder what those women actually look like. They signed up to doll themselves up everyday, which would be a fun job, but I wonder if they ever get tired of having to put on all that makeup and dress like that everyday? I wish I could ask them how they feel when they wake up in the morning and look in the mirror. Is putting on makeup a way of hiding oneself from others? Is it a way to hide from oneself?

To what extent does modern culture affect the way young women choose to dress themselves? At beauty product stores like Sephora, most young women enter seaching for a product that will help them look better. Of course the employees need to display their products by putting it on themselves, but how much does it affect their customers? Do teenagers feel pressured to look like these women?

I also wonder how much this drives sales. My guess is that the women employees in the store who flaunt their products on their own bodies, convince their customers enough to buy those products and more. What I find most interesting however is that one look at a person can unconsciously have an effect on your own personal ways and habits.

"What a day for a daydream"

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-daydreaming/201001/how-work-your-daydreams

"I've been havin’ a sweet dream
I been dreamin’ since I woke up today
It’s starrin’ me and my sweet dream
Cause she's the one that makes me feel this way..." -Lovin Spoonful

Sometimes I catch my mind drifting, slowly but surely detaching itself from the present when suddenly and abruptly it's interrupted by reality. I daydream, like most people, about many different things. I'll think about what would happen if I were to just stand up on a table in the middle of a lecture and curse the teacher. Would anyone laugh? What would the expression on my teacher's face be? Would I ever actually have the guts to do it? But really, I have thought about this several times during some boring lectures. It's a thought that keeps me entertained and more importantly, awake.

Often times however, I daydream about very emotional experiences. Yesterday was the 3 year death anniversary of my grandma. Throughout that whole dreadful Monday, my mind kept wandering to the events that surrounded that same day 3 years previous. During all my morning classes, I could almost smell the flowers, feel the cold marble floor of the basilica under my feet, see a procession of cars all with the same red flag on their antennas, and practically hear my own weeping. A wave of sorrow took over me. Daydreams can be both positive and negative, and are powerful all the same.

Six Degrees of Separation

Today, our resource informationalist at school was providing us with various tools to use to best maximize our reader pool when blogging. I was curious to know whether or not my friends were the only ones reading my blogs. So on this blog, The Blak Umbrella, I was looking under the "Stats" tab and found that people from the U.S., Germany, Russia, and even 1 person from Malaysia read, or at least stumbled upon, my blog at one point. As a result, this ultimately got me thinking about the world's interconnectedness. Ostensibly, the internet can have two people across the world connected within a matter of several button pushings and mouse clickings. It's becoming easier and easier to connect with strangers.

For example, chatroulette is a website that allows one to video chat with strangers. At the push of a button, a new stranger will appear.

Omegle is a website where one can simply have a conversation with a stranger. It's like facebook chat except there are no user names, no pictures of you, no webcams, and the amount of personal information you choose to give out is up to your own discretion.

The scary thing is how easy it is to utilize these social websites. You don't need to sign up for anything, nor create a profile. Anyone and everyone can access it as anonymously as they want.

Here's a fun fact that I heard awhile back (not sure if it's true): you pass a person at least 7 times before actually meeting them. I constantly think about this idea when I meet someone new: how many times have I passed you before in my life? This weekend I just met a volleyball coach at a coaching clinic. He looked very familiar and I couldn't help thinking: how many times have our teams been in the same tournaments? Did you go watch USA play Poland this summer too? Were you sitting in front of me? And then another question: do you know my uncle (who is a volleyball coach too)?

I wondered if he knew my uncle because the volleyball world is so small and I couldn't understand where I knew him from. Then I played a game with myself: I wonder how many degrees of separation there is between him and I. Who does he know who has a friend who has a friend who has a friend who is friends with me?

This summer in the magazine Muse, I read about the idea of the six degrees of separation on Facebook. If you were to pick any stranger in the world on facebook, you could most likely find a friend of theirs who has a friend who has a friend (and so on for six times) who is friends with you. I think this theory might be true, especially since I've befriended people on Facebook who live across the country and and yet we have at least 1 mutual friend. If I were to befriend someone from Denmark, I think it could be possible to have on average, a sixth degree of separation with that stranger. Crazy, isn't it? Want to know something crazier? In this ABC article from November this year, Facebook's recent experiements show stats that say the sixth degree is now the 4.74 degree!

Our connectedness as a world shows the power of influence we have on each other, be it through our ideas or simply through our social connections, our interconnectedness makes the world smaller and the strangers on the streets less..strange.


Read more about six degrees on Wikipedia (There are more links if you scroll to the bottom where it says "external links". There are some fascinating ones.)

Read about the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" trivia game. That's just funny and yet so incredibly mind-blowing.


Picture source:
http://futurefilm.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/footloose.jpg