Truth is Beauty, and Beauty is Los Angeles

This past Saturday, I participated in a scavenger hunt throughout all of Los Angeles.  One of our missions was to take a photo of a guy with a six-pack.  In any other city, you would have to clarify “six-pack”…and being from Boston, I immediately thought of beer.  But given that this was LA, we didn’t need clarification.

LA is full of guys (and girls) sporting six-packs, eight-packs, and even twelve-packs (I imagine there must be a few conjoined-twin bodybuilders at Muscle Beach).  It’s a sickeningly beautiful city, only pockmarked by the ugly, pale, displaced East Coasters who ruin all the prettiness.  On Saturday, we had no trouble finding a shirtless guy in LA who was willing to be photographed for his abs.  He even tried to help us out with another one of our missions (take a photo with a celebrity) by offering up the fact that he was in a Levi’s commercial.

In LA, everyone suffers from the abnormally high curve of relative attractiveness.  A 7 in Boston would barely be a 4 in LA.  A 4 in Boston would need to hide his face out here, for fear of scaring children.  At every turn in LA, there’s another advertisement claiming that a new product will make you more beautiful: it’ll get rid of your back fat, arm fat, belly fat, etc. — without fattening your wallet, of course (it’s such a common refrain that I wonder if these fat-burning places really do make you pay in cash).  In LA, beauty is a choice, something you can achieve if you throw enough money at it: you can take pills for silkier hair, apply creams for healthier hands, and slay babies for softer skin.  Put all the right ingredients together, and you can be LA beautiful too.

This city is like a strange, stunning, alter-world, where girls named Kitty eat dinner through intravenous tubes, and guys named Sergio flex their muscles at every possible occasion.  On Saturday evening, we saw another shirtless man doing pull-ups on an elementary school’s jungle gym in the middle of West Hollywood.  It would have seemed awfully pedophilic had it not been for his incredibly sculpted body — I suppose that in order to keep those huge arms in shape, maybe he does need to do the monkey bars all day.

Now that I’m living in LA, I’m relinquishing my dream of getting a Sanrio modeling gig (Goodbye, Kitty).  It’s intimidating to live in a place where people count their freckles and think obesity starts at size 2.  This morning, I found a giant mystery bruise on my right leg.  In any other city, a huge, unsightly bruise would be a great conversation starter (“Hey! Where did you get that shiner?” … “No idea? Awesome!”).  But in LA, the same yellow bruise is like a shrieking alarm, calling out all your physical defects (“Where did you get that?” … “You don’t know? It’s probably jaundice.”).  I won’t be able to wear skirts for a week.

I can only hope that I’ll meet a cute, non-beastly, non-jaundiced 4… and hopefully that’s not a reach.

^{Yes, there are 700,000 more results for “getting rid of fat los angeles” than for all of “inner beauty”…}