Seeing beautiful women through broken glasses

When I was in bootcamp, we marched and marched and did many, many pushups on a place called "Worm Island." We did not see any women. No live women, no women on the movie screen, no television women, and no pictures of women in magazines.
During this period of sensory deprivation, we marched across a bridge, going to some lecture or other, and someone noticed a person running around a track. A long, long ways off.
"Hot chick," somebody said. The whisper ran through the marching ranks and we were soon all staring off at this figure while trying to stay in step.
"How can you tell she's hot?" somebody asked, breaking our intense concentration. Of course she's hot, I thought. We all thought.
"How can you tell it's a woman?" someone else asked. Technically, breasts were not obvious at that distance, and not even the hair was clear.
But we knew. We knew she was a woman, we knew she was hot. We knew she was wearing yellow.
"It's the color," someone added, "it's so refreshing to see yellow." Because women wear yellow.

What brings this up is that recently my glasses broke. I can see up close just fine. As the distance grows, things seem fuzzy. During our normal Thursday night girl-watching session, I took the best chair, as usual, but had to rely on my friends to verify whether what I was seeing was "hot." Not that I couldn't see it in my head. The street was flooded with beautiful women, and every single one triggered all the normal responses. Hot Damn. Many appeared to be looking at me, too. My intellect questioned this, but I told my intellect to go work on World Peace and quit bothering me. Hot women everywhere, looking at me.
After dark, things get worse, though. I was walking through a nice, residential neighborhood. A woman, with dog, walking towards me. This kind of neighborhood is sometimes very friendly, but often people glance at you, wondering why you are walking through their private world. I couldn't tell. Going into to default mode, I not only waved at her, I said hi, just as her facial features resolved in front of me. They looked grim, at first. Had I seen them, I probably would have looked away. But the greeting was gone from my lips and could not be recalled. With a trace of reluctance, she brightened, smiled, and said hi. I don't think the smile lasted, though.

posted by dan @ 11:50 AM