How to Define Beauty? How to Define NELP?

I knew people wouldn't understand NELP when I came back, when I tried to tell them about it. I didn't know that people could also be so...dismissive? I don't know if that's the right word, but it's the one that I'm using for now.

Do people know? Can they see how it's changed me? Or do they just see me, covered in bug bites, skin peeling from sunburn that I so rarely get, maybe a little more muscled in the legs? I wonder if they wonder about that.

I tried to explain to someone what it meant to shave your head, and why it was beautiful. Today there was the comment of "you need to shave your legs" and my first thought was "why?" I asked that question. The conversation looked something like this:

"Because it just looks better. It's unattractive to have hairy legs."
"Well, you don't think guys are unattractive who have hairy legs, do you?"
"No, but they're guys. Don't you think girls should have nice, clean, beautiful legs?"
"What difference does it make? Why do women have that social expectation and idea for beauty? When did that happen?" I laugh. I don't really think it's all that funny.
"You do whatever makes you happy."

This ends my conversation, but not my thoughts about it. I know that one can't always do what makes them happy. If we all lived like that, we wouldn't be able to coexist well with one another. But how do I explain that NELP enhanced the fact that humans in general are beautiful creatures, no matter what we choose to do with our hair or our legs? It's like asking me to describe NELP, to convey exactly what it is or what it does or what it did to me. I'm not sure that I can do that. I'm not sure how much I want to try.

My Other Life

Its time to inaugurate this blog.

I've started my engineering internship in Danville, PA - and in general I'm really geeked out about the ideas surrounding the new things I'm dealing with (pharmaceutical manufacturing) - but I don't understand a lot of it yet. Here's a little something I wrote up while pretending to take notes in a 4-hour meeting this morning in which I only understood every third comment... I decided to have a NELP moment instead. These were inspired by Lydia Davis' poems (in T's class) of the short definition type - ... Alas, here are my thoughts from ....

Yellow Legal Pad
The temporary settling out of ideas to be cleaved from the masses.

Diagrams
1. The paper on which to blame your faulty vision of the world
2. The connections and line by which we make minds touch
3. A focused land of fuzzy peaches

Desk
Flat mind bending curves to will

Cubicle
Tacks break through walls to see home in a pinhole

Focus
Blue eyes, bent brow, paper, and a pen clicks

Light
1. The window calls my name.
2. A harshness eliminating freedom or a tender curve of the arm to lay in.
3. Patterns named while in darkness
4. A fake view of life--close your eyes to perceive

Easy
What is known already or what can be learned quickly?

Engineering
1. Creativity found through process.
2. Tactical meeting – 10 minds in a square trying to find the prisms of failure
3. Questioning, confusion, answers, lists—safety glasses in polos fueled by a mother liquor of reaction and releasing valves. A transmitter fails and storage leaks into the world. An operator radios to follow the line – the engineer asks about the controller while drawing black limits on to the white cubicle wall.

Motivation
1. A dream left back home, hard wired to your brain
2. A poster on the wall, enough to make you laugh about your plans