Pretty Is As Pretty Does

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." Leo Tolstoy

I am some kind of anomaly in my demographic: I just don't care a whit about lifestyle blogs and that pervasive purveyor of the aesthetic life called Pinterest. Blogs like Nie Nie's, as well as the endless array of lovely pin-able ideas congregating online somehow manage to turn me off in a visceral way.

I may offend some people by saying this. I don't intend to denigrate your favorite blogs or trash-talk your online pinning habit, if this is indeed your ball of wax. I just simply don't really like those things myself, and I find it sort of interesting that my take on the world of "beautiful living" which cycles around the web seems to be very much in the minority.

Do I think blogs and pins about inventive hairstyles and feminine shoes, handcrafted art projects and effervescent dessert recipes, stylish home decor ideas and fashionable baby gear are bad? I do not think they are bad; I think they are boring.

I have a couple of friends who, in the midst of the wildly popular Harry Potter and Twilight era, resisted being sucked into fan-dom. They just didn't care for books in the fantasy or paranormal teen romance genres, and their indifference set them apart from the teeming masses of excitable fans. I readily admit that I joined in on the craze and had a lot of fun reading these books and going to midnight showings of the films they beget.

But this time around, I am the skeptical, unimpressed bystander to an aspect of the Internet which is running with a full head of steam. I just haven't been able to get into pinning pretty project ideas that I have no intention of ever producing. I get crotchety hearing about posts by lifestyle bloggers which flaunt their considerable, trend-setting, avant garde style. So you have good taste, good for you. You're stylish and you blog about it all the time? I just can't bring myself to really care.

I tend to favor blogs by my friends who write simply, directly, honestly, and humorously about their lives. It's real. It's not necessarily pretty. Sometimes it's gritty. But it is REAL and it is happening! And I find it infinitely more intriguing.

Pretty things are fun to look at, but I think Tolstoy truthfully points out a common fallacy that because they are beautiful, we think they are also meaningful. Even as a maven of stylishness, blogger Nie remarked that after her dramatic accident and life-changing recovery, she began to see that while beautiful things are great, they are not as important as people. She wrote that having a good heart, a kind heart, became far more important to her.

I don't write this as an attack on my friends who enjoy peering in the looking glass of an online world to gaze at things of beauty. I simply like my interactions candid, my blogs unabashedly down to earth, and my leisure time free from a queue of beautification projects. Call me lazy. Or snarky. Or weird. It's how I feel. But my life is still beautiful.