Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Darren Barefoot: “speaking as a frequent observer of Canadian women, you're all beautiful. I particularly remember returning to Vancouver after a year in Ireland and being agog at the abundance and multiplicity of hotness walking around the streets (Irish women, you're lovely too, but your gene pool is way narrower, reducing the diversity factor significantly). And men, tell your womenfolk that they're beautiful--that oughta help convince them.”

He's absolutely right. I've been working in downtown Vancouver for a month and I consistently marvel at not only the amount of great-looking women walking around doing an excellent job of pretending they're not hot, but the amount of tall hot women. I'm 6'3", so women are almost uniformly shorter than me, but the thing that still surprises me is how many of them are in the 5'10" to 6'2" range and the percentage of them that are stunningly beautiful. Some of them cheat, though, like that Asian woman in Pacific Centre who was nearly my height but had three-inch platform shoes on. Yes, I admit it, I look at a woman's shoes and judge her partly based on their quality and appropriateness for what she's wearing elsewhere on her body.

On the subject of telling women that they are beautiful, I think that's absolutely the right thing to do. I've been intentionally letting slip that the females with whom I am acquainted on a friendship level that they are beautiful. They aren't local women, mind you, so I've had to do this using text as my medium of communication, but my local female friends, I've come to realize in the last few months, are staggeringly beautiful, and I think my mutual male friends would be inclined to agree, although I haven't heard them say to their faces that they are beautiful or even that they like what they've done to their hair or noticed that necklace their friend made for them. (The best is when you don't know that their friend made it, because that not only gives you credibility when you say you like it, but gives them a story to tell about it.) There is one friend that will be going away for a while that I think is particularly beautiful—#2 amongst my friends if you ask me—partly because she is very easy to look at but also because she, whenever she's in my company, makes an honest effort to find out what's new with me. She has a certain way of making my belief that I don't want to talk to anyone erroneous.