I am taking a break

...from doing my work-work to spend some valuable time procrastinating. I like to do this just in case I become too productive, or sometimes even just when I am on the cusp of becoming productive. That way, I fall farther and farther behind and add another heaping spoonful of anxiety to my collection. Cleverly, I then no longer oversleep! ...because I simply cannot sleep due to my mind's unequaled ability to worry about the consequences of not being productive.


I was cleaning my sunglasses with my shirt as I sat at a red light earlier today, and bemoaned the prominence of a number of gouges in the lenses. A few of the most prominent mars were of origin that readily sprang to mind. Several weeks ago I was working on the underside of my truck when I bumped my head into, and then rubbed against, one of the moorings for the sidepanel. My head was just fine, but the right lens of my glasses proudly displayed my lack of preparation for the job.

So as I sat at the light, I was just kicking myself wondering why I had not removed them. For a brief moment I considered the fact that had the glasses not been there, it would have been my eye displaying out-and-out stupidity instead of just poor preperation... but as I envisioned exactly the situation I'd been in, I concluded that due to their in-set placement, my eyes really wouldn't have been in danger. In fact, our human eyes are really fantastically located to make sure we don't accidentally blind ourselves with any objects larger than a finger. (Knock-on-wood, my zero-for-hundreds racquetball-sans-goggles eye-injury tally can attest to that.)

Then two thoughts surfaced to immediately compliment eachother...

1. Thank you, evolution, for not putting my eyes on antennae or something
2. Severely injuring an eye would really suck for mating purposes

Mind you, I meant contemporary mating purposes when I thought that. As in, I imagine a serious eye injury could leave you looking not so aesthetically pleasing to the ladies. But! It then occurred to me that surely those two thoughts are probably quite closely related.

Aesthetics... as I would define it without any knowledge of the real definition, is a quality judgement based purely on visual inspection. I imagine somewhere in man's evolution, more than a few guys/primates had their eyes screwed up due to sheer bad luck AND accessibility of the ocular cavity to that bad luck. And after that? More than a few ladies/lady-primates steered clear of those poor injured souls. Surely, our even-then advanced brains were able to suggest varying probabilities of successful hunts/fights/etc between 2-eyed and less-than-2-eyed folks. Those ladies then relegated those guys to the procreation D.L..

And thus, I claim our human desire for pleasing aesthetics was an evolutionary key! Humans who "didn't look right" would get aesthetically red-flagged with good reason. Is it any surprise that the eyes are so frequently quoted as being one of the most striking features of persons we find attractive?! Our "insensitive" tendencies to find out-of-average individuals ugly, while unfortunate for some, is not something that's been manufactured by Cosmo or Soloflex.

Why can't I focus on WORK!??! AAARRGGHH!