B-e-a-yootiful

What defines beauty?
Could it be to have long, silky blond hair, exotic eye color, a slim figure?
Korean girls try their best to dodge the sun as they slather on their sunblock lotions and parade around
under their lacy parasols-for to be darkskinned would be death.

Or could it be that beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
Yet would the beholder be beautiful in our eyes?
Can our eyes be the only thing that measures what beauty is?

???

These questions sprouted out of my mind as I was sitting in bio class, of course not paying attention but
blankly staring at my professor as he lolled on and on about .. what was it? .. ecology-

when I noticed the young man sitting in front of me. His hair was getting a little long and I played out a scene
in my head as I brazenly walked up to him as I presented the idea of getting a haircut, at the same time
becoming his friend (hopefully?)
I was pulled out of this little playful thought as I noticed a little machine settled down on his lap.

Oh? What could this be... feeling the little flicker of my eyes grazing over this foreign object.
There, I saw some buttons, five little ones for his left hand and five other little ones for his right hand.
And underneath those buttons were bunches of raised, spherical dots, all right next to each other, but mostly
were clumped into individual groups. What an organized chaos it is.

It hit me. This young man was stripped of one of the greatest senses of the human race: sight.
Blind. blind. blind. 
This word is used to describe those who can not see with the two things that are lodged into their skulls.
But can they really not see..? Anything??

This is where another day dream enters in as I think about Helen Keller, who was both blind and deaf.
When I was younger, I watched a movie about her life and this one scene stuck out to me: when she is alone
with her teacher's fiance.

They talk, and have a nice conversation until the conversation comes to the subject of kissing. Keller says something along the lines of : "Oh, I've never been kissed before, but how I would really like to try! Just once! But who would be ever so willing to kiss this dumb and useless girl?" Okay, maybe it didn't sound exactly like that, but it certainly rang out the desperation in her voice as she sadly speaks this line.
The fiance of Keller's teacher just listens, and is intrigued, he thinks, "Well this poor girl has never been kissed! How unfortunate this is, I will really be doing her a favor for she truly wants to have the knowledge of what a kiss would feel like. Oh, I'll just kiss her; just once!" And so, he kneels over and kisses her. Then Keller's teacher walks in. oops.

Anyway. The point is... what was the point? Oh, well as I was thinking about Helen Keller, I daydreamed a little more as i imagined dating this blind young man. The question of beauty sprouts out here, as I thought about how this blind boyfriend of mine would never know what I look like, but would he want to?

If time was not spent on how I look, then that time would be spent on the observation and analysis of the person inside of me: my soul.
Would he still think I was beautiful?
If he could see every little thing that was a part of me, every good and every bad thing then clearly, he could judge my character?
This goes back to the question of really being able to see.
Although this young man is blind and can not use his eyes to see colors or faces, anything.
I am guessing that he can see many other things that are much deeper that our eyes can not even
begin to envision.

We're not superman.