Vanity

Vanity. What a horrible word, what a horrible human trait. Approaching the topic of Vanity is somewhat like walking toward a mirror and pointing at the image saying "look at that moron over there" without understanding that you are actually the moron you just impolitely pointed your finger at. Explanation is simple, we are all vain to some degree or another. This is what would make it difficult for me to go "holier than thou" on people around me, were I not as arrogant as I am.

The actual trigger for this rant is the behavior of one person whom I (reluctantly and out of some disturbed sense of patriotic duty and politeness) call my friend. The woman is dreadfully vain. As Vanity more often than not goes hand in hand with her bitch-stepmother Fashion, you can imagine how this person also is a walking 20xy/20xy+1 catalogue, a trait that makes her all the more intolerable. I can be bad. My Vanity is a sneaky monster, insidious and skilled in hiding in plain sight. Hers is a bloody red-striped elephant with an air-horn for a trunk. It has been a month now since she started bothering me about her looks.

Her: Andrej, how do I look?

Me: Ok.

Her: Does it show that I've lost weight?

Me: Errr...

Her: Come on, tell me I'm not a hottie.

Me: Hmm... Right...

Her: Ok, tell me you wouldn't turn your head if you saw me in the street.

Me: Actually, no, I wouldn't.

Her: Why are you lying? You're a fucking fag!

Me: *puzzled face*

And I'm not even bloody Andrej. When the answer to all her questions is "no", her response is "You're a faggot". I can only imagine the hell her fiance is going through on an average day. Poor bastard. But it doesn't end with her looks. One of our common friends and I were discussing where we wanted to go for our next spring break. I expressed a desire to visit Cuba. Her response? "Yeah, we should definitely go there, while he is still alive." "He" being Fidel Castro, her close friend she has a coffee every Thursday with. She overheard someone saying how it would be smart to go to Cuba while Fidel Castro was still alive and she thought that it would make her appear smart if she said it as well. The fact that she doesn't know jack shit about Cuba or Castro did not provide for a good handbrake for her ever-vigilant tongue. What is this called? Fashion. It's fashionable to say something, therefore I shall say it. I don't have to mean it, I don't have to know anything about it. Fashion in service of Vanity.

Exhibit #2. I saw a picture of a couple of my friends (lady from above included) in a very famous club on Manhattan. The name resonated in my mind for a second and I remembered a girl I used to work with in a consulting firm back home who also mentioned having gone to that club one time when she was in New York. She was making a lot of noise and her bragging, met mostly by silence and polite nods on my part, was rather irksome. The source of her pride was the object of my contempt - she was seen by people in a fancy place, which, according to her logic, by the virtue of being perceived as fancy must have made her appear classy and of noble taste. The apparent absence of logic in such reasoning would be a good indicator that the person is drowning in her vanity if it weren't for the fact that it is not apparent to everyone and that people don't give a shit. In fact, it's not aparent to most people because most people are in self-chosen state of comfortable numbness and are disinterested in becoming anything beyond what they are, which is a consequence of, and, paradoxically, the driving power behind herd mentality. But, I shall stray no further.

I suspect that mentioning that i believe that Vanity is everything but gender-picky is a prudent idea. To provide myself with some sort of protection from the impending critique of what appears as my one-sidedness on the issue, my last example will be a man, rather than a woman. A former friend of a friend took the textbook definition of Vanity, ripped it from the textbook, burned it with napalm and nukes and created his own, setting the limits of how vain a person can be somewhere between the words "immensly" and "monumentally" by bringing his night club receipts to school to show people how much money he was spending per night. When I learned about this I was dumbfounded. There was nothing left for me to say or think. Thus I am here, to see what others think about Vanity.

Bible says something along the lines of "first remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye". Well, Bible is full of shit. So lets talk.