Beyond Babedom

We're (way) over 40. Deal with it.

You Lie

You cannot judge a book by its cover. Sometimes those old sayings make a lot of sense. Maybe not the ones my father used to say, like “You sound like a girl with a paper asshole.” But the ones you’ve heard so often that you don’t know what they mean anymore. So you misquote them. My late friend Diann will claim that “He ran around with his head cut off,” leaving out the “like a chicken with. . . ” part.  Which always gave me a chuckle. And my friend Lori says “It’s a doggy dog world.” Which, if you come to my house, might be true. But the older I get (and I’m well beyond being a woman over 40), the more I understand why you truly cannot judge any book by it’s cover. Except maybe romance novels.

Sure, looks tell you something about people. Whether they overeat (but it could be a hormonal imbalance. . . ), or if they’re young (or they could  have just had some great plastic surgery). But there are times that we make some seriously bad judgements calls when we rely on how things look.

Back in the 70s long hair, ripped jeans, tie dye meant hippie, right? Wrong.  Not all hippies were in fact hippies. That is, peace loving, non-racist, left leaning and so on. Oh no. In fact, some of them were downright racist, warmongering or simply Republican – but enjoyed getting high. And now the term “hippie” is often preceded with “dirty, filthy” by younger generations. Come to think of it, that’s the way our parents described us, too. . .

Blondes have it the worst when it comes to being judged by their looks. Dumb and blonde go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or, if I was blonde I might say peanut butter and ham (Sorry, my blonde friends!). But what about when it gets turned topsy turvy? It used to be when you saw someone in a clerical collar, you assumed they were a good person. Now, because of a few despicable priests and their protectors, people see a priest and think pedophile.

But, how does it hurt you to do the book-cover-judging thing? I found out the hard way when I met someone who looked eerily like a guy I knew very well; I unconsciously transferred my feelings to this person and, naturally, trusted him – and that was a big mistake. By judging this guy by the way he looked, I missed all the signals that should have warned me. Lesson learned.

Of course, the biggest pitfall is when we’re attacked from outer space. You know they’re going to either use pods to grow fake humans or employ some kind of diabolic machine to drill into the back of people’s necks to make them turn against the rest of us.

Or maybe they already have. . .

 

 

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2012 at 1:46 PM and is filed under Socializing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Eliza Fayle says:

    Ha! Your dad’s expression reminded me of one my aunt used when ever someone asked her what she was doing when it was obvious what she was doing. She would respond with “I am making tin arseholes for teddy bears.” 🙂

  2. Chris Munson says:

    When I screwed up as a kid, my mother, the disciplinarian in the home, would get angry and moving her hand in a slicing manner, say in Hungarian, “Mek nukleves, feum”, which in her native tongue, translated into “I’m going to make your neck into soup.” You show your age by using the expression, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Nobody buys books anymore. We download ebooks to our tablet, reader, Kindle, or whatever. The updated form is “You can’t judge a Nook, by its title page.”

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