My motto is "Fronti nulla fides", which roughly translates into "Don't judge a book by its cover".
As I mentioned in an earlier post, in CSI, I quite liked the character of Grissom because he always tried to see the whole spectrum of possibilities before he tried to understand what happened.
Most people seeing someone hugging the walls, half-bent and shaking like a leaf on the street will only imagine that this person is drunk. Most people will walk faster and not look at that person too closely, because he or she has to be a drunkard, but... what about that person having a heart-attack? Fever? Ruptured appendix?... Or even malaria or whatever?
Most people jump to conclusions. It's easy - and some people can be so sure of themselves and of their view of the world that their judgement simply has to be the universal truth.
People love clichés and stereotypes because they're reassuring (and they sometimes allow some arrogant bipeds to shove their beliefs down other people's throats).
It really bugs me when people stop at appearances and chose the easiest explanation about something - anything, really.
And yet, since we're not going to change our fellow bipeds, it can be useful to see how this works and to use appearances strategically...
You know the drill, this is when I'm going to explain why I'm writing about this particular topic right now.
The thing is, I've put henna on my hair today to make it look red again.
Eh? Why is she talking about that? I hear you think.
Simple. In this particular story, I'm the book and my cover was being judged, all because I'm seriously de-pigmenting.
I'm not old, my skin looks rather good, I dress in a reasonably "modern" way... I'm not pretty, but I'm okay. Average. Normal.
Yet, since I caught the silly virus that I mentioned in yet another post, my hair's mostly turned white. It's a rather nice silvery kind of white, and I shouldn't care about it - and I don't, but... I used henna today because I've noticed that, as my roots showed more and more and the fully white hair lost their previous henna-produced colour [Oh, and I can't afford to wait for the henna to disappear fully
because... my hair reaches my waist, and it'd be just too incredibly
long - and weird looking], a few people in my life were beginning to treat me differently - and I mean that in quite a radical way. All that because of the way my hair looked.
Since I've got a few decades until I can put on a "lil' old lady" costume, I'm going to use the silliness of the bipeds around me. I'm not bowing to pressure; I'm using people's silliness in order to manipulate them.
Of course, I could go on letting all of my hair reclaim its - now - natural colour and not give a damn, but that would mean having to work extra hard to have idiots look past the hair colour... and life's frigging too short for that kind of grief (all the more since the henna thing doesn't take long and does the job).
There are many things that I'd never do, even to use elementary strategy on plonkers (I never bought into the idea of "no pain, no gain")... But tiny little things that use bipeds' love for stereotypes... Hell, yes!
