A funny thing happened on the way to the dentist: arriving at the waiting room I was assailed by the sheer ugliness of everyone there: misshapen faces, flabby bodies, shapeless feet, very bad skin, cloudy eyes, dressed in rags, with uncombed, stringy hair. The waiting room, equipped "utilitarian" -- cheapest paint and chairs unrelieved by a single picture or flower; windowless; with low ceiling -- also smelled -- on account of the "carpet" -- an idiotic idea in any climate, but absolutely deadly in the tropics. I was compelled to wait nearly thirty minutes while trying not to mind the fetor and averting my eyes from the room and towards the off-grey walls.
My toothache turned into a headache.
I returned home depressed.
This is life in the big city. In the small city, people are perhaps not better looking, but they take care to dress decently -- iron their shirts, match colors, sit properly on their chairs instead of slouching. They comb their hair. They decorate their waiting rooms with a flower or a picture.
The people here on the other hand don't do a thing to look decent. Are they so demoralized by the ugliness of the environment? Do they not bother to make themselves look nice because they know the waiting room will be relentlessly ugly and so will be everyone there? Have they -- given up? Or perhaps they never had the aesthetic sense to begin with? Are they born aesthetically blind? The way people in my apartment building can sit on the hot chlorinated jacuzzi and not suffer skin irritation from the hot acid like I do?
I spent the next few days locked up in my apartment, not daring to go out. This has happened on several occasions before, when the relentless ugliness of a place got the better of me. I got that in college, in America; the ugliness of that place cast me into a long depression which I only managed to cure by leaving. Later, I suffered the same in Taipei -- and ended up leaving soon afterwards. I will leave here soon, too. I must.
Does this happen to you?
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