Stories of Your Life and Others

Adesh Singh, third-year student, speaking at a student debate:
No one's talking about letting an expert system make your decisions.
What makes calli ideal is precisely that it's such a minimal change. Calli
doesn't decide for you; it doesn't prevent you from doing anything. And as
for maturity, you demonstrate maturity by choosing calli in the first place.
Everyone knows physical beauty has nothing to do with merit; that's
what education's accomplished. But even with the best intentions in the
world, people haven't stopped practicing lookism. We try to be impartial,
we try not to let a person's appearance affect us, but we can't suppress our
autonomic responses, and anyone who claims they can is engaged in
wishful thinking. Ask yourself: Don't you react differently when you meet
an attractive person and when you meet an unattractive one?
Every study on this issue turns up the same results: looks help people
get ahead. We can't help but think of good-looking people as more
competent, more honest, more deserving than others. None of it's true, but
their looks still give us that impression.
Calli doesn't blind you to anything; beauty is what blinds you. Calli
lets you see.
Tamera Lyons:

---

So, I've been looking at good-looking guys around campus. It's fun;
weird, but fun. Like, I was in the cafeteria the other day, and I saw this guy
a couple tables away, I didn't know his name, but I kept turning to look at
him. I can't describe anything specific about his face, but it just seemed
much more noticeable than other people's. It was like his face was a
magnet, and my eyes were compass needles being pulled toward it.
And after I looked at him for a while, I found it really easy to imagine
that he was a nice guy! I didn't know anything about him, I couldn't even
hear what he was talking about, but I wanted to get to know him. It was
kind of odd, but definitely not in a bad way.