My Mother, I was going to say my Sainted Mother, but not only would it be untrue, she would be insulted if she heard or read that. (How is that for a run on sentence?) Geez now I have pain in my wrists from typing like 12 minutes a day(with the exception of yesterday when the Blogger Overlords did not like me dissing the banking industry and erased my inspired treatise on mortgage eviltry (new word).
Anyway Mom liked to talk to me about the Superlative Horse a short story out of the Mideast about a poor young horse kid who gains the interest of the Sultan because he is such a good judge of horseflesh. The young man is sent out to find the best horse in the world or,of course, die. When the protagonist finally returns and reports that superlative horse is on the way everybody wants to know what color how big what sex and the young man no knows none of those things. He only knows that it is the best horse in the world.
The lesson being similar to our little dicho in English "you can't judge a book by its cover." She always told me this story in reference to me. I never did figure out if I was supposed to be the horse the kid or the sultan. She may have had some whole other issue in mind and I totally missed the point.
We now live in a culture that is all based on first impressions. I somehow as a very young person got the idea that making a good first impression was only for those without true substance. This has stuck with me throughout my dealings with the world. A person who dresses nicely always arouses a little suspicion that they are lacking confidence or ability and trying to hide the fact. One of the odd things about this is that the majority of people think just the opposite.
Is there a lesson or point to this little story. I guess not, just an observation of an interesting phenomena in my life,although now that I think of it, maybe it is about the difficulty of cross cultural communication .
I grew up in my own little world and as my old track track coach told me, it appears that I cobbled my sense of integrity and morality from reading. So I have a lot of little miss-communications with persons who I think grew up in the same culture as I did. I made many decisions based on my view of the world and was basically mute for 5 years during a shall we say interesting childhood. Because of this and residual shyness(whatever that is) I find that I seem to think a little differently about the world than most people I know . The persons who most think like me are all kind of weird, which makes me think that contrary to my long held belief of being "normal" maybe I am a little weird too.
Anyway it seems that one can be a vain clothes horse or not care at all about clothes or purposely dress "poorly for some reason and it means nothing about one's true nature.
Anyway Mom liked to talk to me about the Superlative Horse a short story out of the Mideast about a poor young horse kid who gains the interest of the Sultan because he is such a good judge of horseflesh. The young man is sent out to find the best horse in the world or,of course, die. When the protagonist finally returns and reports that superlative horse is on the way everybody wants to know what color how big what sex and the young man no knows none of those things. He only knows that it is the best horse in the world.
The lesson being similar to our little dicho in English "you can't judge a book by its cover." She always told me this story in reference to me. I never did figure out if I was supposed to be the horse the kid or the sultan. She may have had some whole other issue in mind and I totally missed the point.
We now live in a culture that is all based on first impressions. I somehow as a very young person got the idea that making a good first impression was only for those without true substance. This has stuck with me throughout my dealings with the world. A person who dresses nicely always arouses a little suspicion that they are lacking confidence or ability and trying to hide the fact. One of the odd things about this is that the majority of people think just the opposite.
Is there a lesson or point to this little story. I guess not, just an observation of an interesting phenomena in my life,although now that I think of it, maybe it is about the difficulty of cross cultural communication .
I grew up in my own little world and as my old track track coach told me, it appears that I cobbled my sense of integrity and morality from reading. So I have a lot of little miss-communications with persons who I think grew up in the same culture as I did. I made many decisions based on my view of the world and was basically mute for 5 years during a shall we say interesting childhood. Because of this and residual shyness(whatever that is) I find that I seem to think a little differently about the world than most people I know . The persons who most think like me are all kind of weird, which makes me think that contrary to my long held belief of being "normal" maybe I am a little weird too.
Anyway it seems that one can be a vain clothes horse or not care at all about clothes or purposely dress "poorly for some reason and it means nothing about one's true nature.
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