On Ageing and why I love internet :D

This post in yet another that makes me love internet.

I had to post a comment thanking her for it.(And blathering on a bit, but I can't help it, I'm textually incontinent, it's a terrible syndrome)

I'm young. That's a fact. I don't have to worry about aging just yet, although my cigarette consumption (BAD!BAD!) is supposedly going to kill off all my skin cells in five years, or something.
Problem : I knew girls when I was in high school who already used antiwrinkle cream. That's something that definitely had me stunned. Girl in question was twenty, because she wasn't that good at school and so was three years late, but even so. Twenty? Are you kidding me?

I mean seriously. Youth might be pretty, but it's kinda dumb. Not always, of course, but I'm not reading all these deconstructions of the world around me by people my age.
I'm immensely thankful for all the blogs out there that put words on what I'm feeling, because I can't say it.
I haven't the experience. I haven't been thinking about it all that long. And it's not the kind of thing I discuss casually with someone while having a cigarette in between classes. I talk about it with my roommate, with JJ, with my closer friends.
I already have a reputation for being kinda intense,for taking some things seriously, this just makes it worse :D
And I'll argue forever the fact that being intense was ever negative.

I guess I'm trying to get to the fact that our cultures have to be totally and completely fucked-up for people to put youth as such an ideal.
Youth doesn't know. We're taught things, but haven't always experienced them. Often haven't experienced them.
I'll seem to be putting my peers down, but I'm not. We're not dumb. Well, not always. But in some things, we haven't been fighting for them long enough, haven't actually started fighting yet because we've haven't realised they were necessary, haven't actually opened our eyes to the world around us.

After all, youth is the time for selfishness. Many of my peers have hardly left home yet. Many don't live adult lives. I don't yet. My parents pay my bills, although I've left home. I couldn't get an education here otherwise, and would be left learning in the second-grade university at home, with all the losers I grew up with.

On the ageing part-I don't want to be afraid of getting old. I guess I'll see when I come to it. Time goes far too fast in any case, I'm turning twenty in a couple months.
But I'm not scared yet. I have good role models around me.

My mother turned fifty this year, and despite her self-proclaimed fat (my mother has spent her life since I turned up dieting and putting on weight. I find it infinitely depressing. Luckily she's reasonable about it and doesn't go nuts, which has helped me have a semi reasonable stance with food-basically I just eat what I want and to hell with it), she's an attractive woman, who does so fucking much, it's just not funny. I'd like to see someone tell her life at fifty is over. The woman does more than I do, puts me to shame.
My godmother is the same age. Put them together and I'm the one who feels old :)
My best friend's mother is forty. She's an incredibly attractive woman, like every woman in that family,that includes the Best Friend, who's twenty, her mother's two sisters, and her grandmother, who's fifty-eight and amazing.

They're all active, fun women who happen to be attractive. And that shouldn't be the most important thing a woman should retain as time passes.
What's the point in beauty if you can think behind it? If it's just an empty shell?
I guess that's all too easy for me to say. After all, I get to be young, slim, and conventionally attractive.

I'm not special. I'm not different. I just want to able to grow up in peace, and that's not likely to happen.

Funnily enough, I don't feel that pressured by magazine girls. And me and Roommate dearest have a good laugh every month with Glamour and Cosmo who are the root of all evil from what I've understood, but I think the French versions are slightly different, and they're the best thing to empty your head, and why on earth am I justifying myself?Tsch.

I'd feel more pressured by the girls around me.
I live in a upper-class town. half is money, half is students. Expensive. Quality. Lots of southern bourgeoisie.
I'm in a Humanities university. That means the ratio of girls is about sixty/seventy percent.
My classes are full of girls. So competition is high, which is why two strangers call me "that kinda intellectual, stuck up bitch who thinks she's all that", I suppose.
And France is a VERY fattist country. Remember that book "French women don't get fat" ? French women aren't supposed to get fat. It's unfeminine.
Also, the food helps, but that's a whole different story.

Back to the story, since I rather look towards the girls and women around me, it's incredibly reassuring for when I get older. I don't feel that I'll be worthless at thirty.
My teachers are all over thirty. Ms L, one of my chinese teachers, was at least sixty, and she was amazing. Every one of her students loved her.
I watch TV. I follow mainstream media. I read blogs. I read magazines. I'm that common. And I'm cursed with an amazing memory for all things pointless, so I remember stupid details about celebrities.
But I don't feel pressured to fit in to their world. Also because it's perfectly impossible, but primarily because they're too far-off.
We have very beautiful celebrities of our own, who occasionnally turn up here because it's one of the main Southern towns, but they're a lot more real, and they're freaks of nature :)

Look at Catherine Deneuve. She's said to have been under the knife a lot. She still looks pretty natural, pretty good for a woman in her seventies.(I think she's 71, but I'm not certain)
Brigitte Bardot was insanely beautiful, and gave up on all that to fight for animal rights (and become a right-wing nut, but that 's a whole different story). She maybe didn't "age gracefully". Point of the story? She doesn't give a fuck, she's far too busy elsewhere.And she did so much during her acting career!
Line Renaud turned eighty this year and most of French TV celebrated her birthday.

Come to think of it most popular French actresses are forty or more.
Emmanuelle Béart,Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, Nathalie Baye, Emmanuelle Seigner, Juliette Binoche, Catherine Frot, Jeanne Moreau.

Some of them are notoriously insane. Not all are amazingly beautiful. But they all seem comfortable in their own skin, even though I suspect Emmanuelle Béart of having had her lips plumped up^^

Shite, this is far too long.