Glasses and Fitness

Its that time of the year again, when the campus is teeming with people walking around taking or giving orientation speeches, meeting friends after the holidays, going to one of the zillion offices to haggle with some adminstrative-type, etc. Basically, if you step out on any of the streets in the campus at certain times of the day, you will be caught in a deluge of undergrads with a few grads thrown in for variety.

As usual, I was walking by myself and being dead bored, I decided to play my old game of guessing other people's traits from their faces, gait, clothing, etc. I gave up doing this in India long ago because I kept arriving at combinations of stereotypes like, "That guy looks like a holier-than-thou urban partying-type," or "That girl looks like a typical studious conservative telugu girl who works hard and makes her parents proud with good marks," and so on and so forth. I accept that I was probably wrong most of the time, but anyway, my point is that I can't do things the same way in the US because I can't differentiate American features as well as I can with Indians. That makes it more interesting, actually.

While I was engaged in my guessing game, it suddenly struck me that I kept analyzing women wearing glasses. I don't know what quirk of my subconscious made me do that, but I was thinking, "That girl can probably knock me out in an intellectual conversation," or "That's a self-assured confident woman who knows her differential equations," etc. So much for guys-don't-make-passes-at-girls-who-wear-glasses. If I were an American undergrad I would be making passes only at women wearing glasses... or so I believed at that moment.

And then it happened that I passed by the window-studded wall of the treadmill room of the fitness center. A brief digression. In India, I noticed that most people only go to gyms to take the edge off the flab and there are only a few who are religious in their fitness and diet regimes. However, in the US, there is a good percentage of people who are very particular about these things and work hard at keeping their bodies in perfect shape.

So, when you pass a fitness center in the US, the odds are you'll see some really gorgeous women - and handsome men, for that matter. Hence, I'll admit that my staring this time was not for analysis but merely to gawk. Now, I'm not the type to stare at women usually, so I quickly reddened and turned my eyes back on the path, only to see that every single person near me irrespective of age, gender and sexual orientation had slowed their walking pace and were staring at those same windows.

Relieved that I am not a lecher but merely a normal human being, I pondered the eternal question: glasses girl or fitness center girl? Brains or looks? Which quality do you first look for? It's like asking Joey Tribioni to choose between Food and Sex.

Oh well, the point is moot for me anyway, given I speak to members of the opposite sex (face to face) for, like, 20 minutes a week in my current situation. But what about you, dear reader? What's you preference, brains or looks? Let us say, for arguments sake, you can't have both.

Cheers,
Prashanth.