High Quality Advice for Life

Disclaimer: I am going to sound like a horrible, self-centered, shallow, vain bitch through the majority of this post.  Please read to the end.  I swear I improve slightly.

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This is my advice for an easier, happier life: be attractive.

Today, I was walking into Georgetown and was stopped on the street by this guy I kind of thought I recognized but not nearly enough to actually talk to.  Turns out I recognized him because we sat by each other on my plane ride back from CA after Thanksgiving and we had chatted for a good part of the flight.  It was a decent conversation.  Clearly nothing life-changing - I only half remembered him all of 2 months later.  From what I recollect, we discussed fun places to go out in DC, whether or not I liked my iPad and how crappy the movies were that were playing.

But he apparently remembered me well enough to say, "Kathryn!  How are you?" and then, observing my half-confused, half-terrified expression, to press on with, "Remember, the flight back to DC?  I'm in cybersecurity blah blah blah..."

So I pushed my way through the conversation, lied about being late to class and walked away with an email I'll never, ever use.  And my first thought, because the pressure of this 30-day challenge is overwhelming me a little, was, "I'm totally writing a blog post about how being able to remember faces and names is a double-edged sword - it's convenient if the other person is good at it, too, but can also come off super creepy."  Because this guy came off as super creepy.

But then I started thinking about how much I wished I could have such an amazing conversation with, say, Adam Scott that he would remember it weeks later and want to give me his email so we could talk again.  This guy was more of an uglier, pimplier version of Mark Hamil, who is just not my cup of tea.  To be fair, he also had the conversational skills of one of my 7th-graders.  But to be even more fair, Adam Scott could have the conversational skills of a stone wall and I would have wanted his email.

I think the moral of the story of my run-in with my plane buddy is this: you can get away with just about anything if you are attractive.  You can be dumb, smart, smarmy, socially inept, too loud, too quiet, whatever, and people will assume the best of you and let you get away with just about anything.  That last article was a more dry explanation.  This article speaks to a more pop-culture-y, fun explanation.  But either way, the point is that if you look like Zooey Daschanel or Adam Scott or whoever, you can pretty much act the way you want and people will let you get away with it.  So if I could give one piece of advice to someone just starting out in life, it would be this: become attractive early, and stay that way.

I say this 100% as someone who cannot get away with anything.  I feel awkward and embarrassed all the time.  I just felt I needed to publicly acknowledge my own prejudices.  And have an excuse to look up pictures of Adam Scott.