I was thinking that for this column, I should list the advantages to living in high-priced single student housing.
Housing prices these days vary anywhere from $200 to $300 per month, which could mean an end-of-the-year difference of $900, so it is a big decision.
Do I splurge on style or do I resort to comfortable price tag of squalor?
Considering the low-budget housing situation, I thought of carpet stained with bleach and teriyaki sauce, light fixtures that make your front room seem like a dungeon, and walls that are textured so roughly that you could cut your hand if you're not careful.
In the end, however, I came to just one really important advantage of high-priced housing: beautiful housing holds beautiful people.
It is a mysterious advantage, and one that I will try to dissect it with care.
It's strange how it works, but it seems that just as in the movies, the prettiest girls are the rich ones.
I am a journalist, and as such it is my job to always question such assumptions or appearances.
I have talked to a few people about this observation, and come up with a few explanations of why it might be so. I have come up with the following possibilities.
1.) The grass is always greener on the other side or the fence. Perhaps when we see rich people as being better-looking, it is simply because we have never been there. We have never been on the rich side long enough to realize that they are just the same as the rest of us. The perceived beauty could thus be only an effect of the social distance.
2.) The prestige element. What is more attractive about someone, how they actually look, or their surroundings? Perhaps what creates the appearance of beauty could very well the high quality surroundings, like a nice car a nice apartment, and a father with a nice job.
3.) Job's Daughters. If you have ever thoroughly read the account of Job in the bible, you know that after much suffering Job was awarded for his spiritual endurance with wealth and beautiful daughters. Thus it would be logical, that daughters of fathers, who had been thus blessed temporally as Job, might also have beautiful daughters.
4.) Makeup, hair and clothes. This comes from a girl who was asked about the issue at hand, and seems to be popular among those of the female gender. She said, that what makes the rich girls seem beautiful is not their inherent beauty at all, rather the make-up, hair styling and clothing that they are able to afford due to their exalted financial state.
5.) Good genes. This is the rather old-fashioned idea that the richest men are able to choose the best-looking wives, and thus have the best looking, and richest daughters. It might not be the norm in 21st century, but I think it still holds some validity.
All this analysis leads me to believe that the original statement is perfectly valid. There seems to be evidence that richer people might be intrinsically more beautiful, and even more evidence that even if they are not, they do a good job of seeming that way.
Beauty is only skin-deep, and in the eye of the beholder, after all.
So what matters when beauty is concerned, is who can play the part. And it seems that the affluent members of society are those best equipped to do it.