Complex Numbers

Beauty's Snare

I'm sorely tempted to respond to this prompt with "differential calculus" or "matrix algebra."

PROMPT November 7th

It's said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Describe something that you think is beautiful or attractive that someone else might consider unattractive or ugly.

But if I talked about those subjects then no one would read it. Hell, I probably lost half the potential readers just by mentioning them.

My first impulse, other than math (hey, where are you going?), was to describe my spirit animal, the turkey vulture. Majestic creatures they are, embodying the ideal of maximum gain from minimum effort, an efficiency that appeals to me as an engineer and a lazy person.

But objectively, those birds are ugly as hell.

Okay, not "objectively." There's no such thing as objective beauty or ugliness, and that's even before you get into the "beauty is only skin deep" cliché. But really, I don't know if even I would hang a photograph of a close-up of a turkey vulture's head in my living room.

There are, of course, certain things that are generally agreed upon to be aesthetically pleasing, such as the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, or, well, pretty much everything else in France with the possible exception of this apartment complex in Paris  , and that's still more attractive than anything I've ever seen in New Jersey except maybe the Statue of Liberty, which... oh, right, that's from France too.

You know what's pretty, though? Well, no, you probably won't agree with me, because that's the whole point of the prompt. But I think spiders are kinda elegant.

Not at first, of course. When I see a big damn spider, my reaction is the same as most peoples': aaaah get it away GET IT AWAY. But then my rational mind takes over (provided, of course, that the arachnid isn't preparing to chomp on me) and I can see their beauty: eight symmetric, articulated legs; multiple jeweled eyes; delicate mandibles that I definitely do not want to get too close to.

And then there's their webs. Not all spiders spin webs, of course, but I marvel at the evolutionary process, whatever it might have been, that led some spiders to be able to instinctively create those works of art. Yeah, I know, I'd think differently about them if I were a fly, and I really, really hate walking into one unexpectedly (because that's a good way to get munched on by a spider), but they captivate the eye just as effectively as they snare insects.

Not that I want to live with one or anything. But when they're outside, where they belong, and they don't sneak up on me, I'm fine with them; they spin their webs and eat the bugs and gleam in the sunlight.