{"id":94,"date":"2004-03-29T20:02:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-29T20:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/2004\/03\/29\/casually-realizing-its-who-i-am\/"},"modified":"2004-03-29T20:02:00","modified_gmt":"2004-03-29T20:02:00","slug":"casually-realizing-its-who-i-am","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/2004\/03\/29\/casually-realizing-its-who-i-am\/","title":{"rendered":"Casually realizing it&#8217;s who I am"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>San and Beth are good about putting pictures in their entries, and it looks like I&#8217;ve snagged that habit off of them. Will keep it going for the time being&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.berkeley.edu\/~aj\/photos\/para.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.cs.berkeley.edu\/~aj\/photos\/paras.jpg\" border=0><\/a><br \/>\nIn my previous entry I wondered whether I&#8217;ve ever stepped on any part of the planet that no human ever had before. I figured not (and the next day&#8217;s hiking, while lots of fun, was so rain-soaked that it allowed for no new opportunities) &#8212; but thinking back, I did a lot of  off-trail hiking and climbing around Aspen (the cliff above was one of our conquests) with my friend Andrew over the course of several summers while I was growing up. Chances are I scored then. Woohoo!<\/p>\n<p>The UConn men and women are both doing amazingly well. Both were two-seeds going into the tournament (ha!), but both have made it to the Final Four in dominant fashion. In fact, they&#8217;re doing so well that my paranoid fan-ness (cultivated by years of being a Red Sox, England, and Newcastle fan) suggests that a collapse before the end seems inevitable. The men play Duke, perhaps the most hated team in college basketball, on Saturday. I&#8217;m pumped!<\/p>\n<p>Last week I got on Lee&#8217;s case for not updating his blog in almost a year (never mind not replying to my emails :). But then I went and reread <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefigtrees.net\/lee\/log.html\">his last entry<\/a>, which included this snippet:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Foosball was a learning experience, as AJ dominated the ranks and also strove to emphasize the beauty and science of the game and to elevate our play.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> In fact, I think that&#8217;s one of the nicest things anyone&#8217;s ever said about me. So in the interest of keeping that entry as his latest, I&#8217;ve decided to stop bugging him :).<\/p>\n<p>I really wanted to write about tradition (at least from a naive, outsider&#8217;s point of view) but I haven&#8217;t quite solidified my thoughts yet. So instead I&#8217;ll talk about attractiveness. <\/p>\n<p>Okay, first: yes, physical attractiveness is a superficial trait. But then again, so are other seemingly more respectable traits, such as intelligence and, to a lesser degree, sense of humor. (I <i>do<\/i> think that the way someone&#8217;s sense of humor manifests itself &#8212; the types of jokes he or she makes or laughs at &#8212; is telling.) Neither attractiveness nor intelligence says anything about the kind of person someone is: whether she&#8217;s trustworthy, kind, good-natured, generous, etc. <\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;ll be the first to admit I&#8217;m a superficial guy: I like attractive, smart, funny women. But as I get older, it becomes more and more obvious that these traits alone do not a good relationship make. Still nice to have though!<\/p>\n<p>I had a point here, but I don&#8217;t remember what it was&#8230; probably some attempt to rationalize why I always write about superficial things. Haha.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, now that I&#8217;ve cleared my conscience (phew! :), I can continue. The way I see it, there are three qualities that guys find physically attractive in women: <b>cuteness<\/b>, <b>hotness<\/b>, and <b>beauty<\/b>. Women can exhibit any combination of the three (or, possibly, all three at once!). <i>No one quality is intrinsically valued higher than the other two<\/i>, although I imagine different guys weight each of the three differently according to personal taste. Furthermore, <i>possessing two or three of the qualities is not necessarily better than possessing just one<\/i>. In short, I&#8217;d consider the metrics roughly orthogonal and thus not comparable.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll give some examples:<br \/>\nCute: Renee Zellweger<br \/>\nHot: Carmen Electra<br \/>\nBeautiful: Nicole Kidman<br \/>\nCute and hot: Britney Spears, Tara Reid<br \/>\nCute and beautiful: Julianne Moore<br \/>\nHot and beautiful: Liz Hurley<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t want to give any more examples because I fear that they (and even the ones I listed) might stir up controversy and obscure the underlying theory, which I think is quite sound :). However, if you mention any particular actress, it&#8217;s fairly easy to categorize her in any of the eight possible categories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>San and Beth are good about putting pictures in their entries, and it looks like I&#8217;ve snagged that habit off of them. Will keep it going for the time being&#8230; In my previous entry I wondered whether I&#8217;ve ever stepped &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/2004\/03\/29\/casually-realizing-its-who-i-am\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1c91x-1w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boopidy.com\/aj\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}