The uglies.

Fresh snow is pretty. Slushy mush is not. But as Yvonne noted, ugly is not always bad. Slush shows progress- snow has to get ugly before spring is truly here.

I really think you all could agree with me on this one. Tacky Christmas decorations still up in February is ugly. Especially the misshaped bell one. This is aesthetically ugly.


And this. This is a pile of shit. My dad always said you could say that word if you were talking about the real thing (as in "we're going to the barn to pitch shit") and this is it. Sure it has some pleasing texture to the picture, but who's going to call it pretty or beautiful? If you are tempted to call it that then you should smell it. Once again though, ugly isn't bad- this pile is going to be really good fertilizer for the field it is sitting on the edge of. Organic fertilizer at that. And that, my friends, is good (but not cute.)

So- as I said, or Yvonne said, ugly isn't a bad thing. It just gives us a counterpoint to all the pretty and cute. As a professor of mine once said (I don't have it word for word) if you lived in a red box and never saw the color green, you really wouldn't know/understand the color red. He was a geography prof- and he said it in reference to traveling, but I think it can work here too.

So next I will move on to gritty.
Gritty is more aesthetically pleasing than ugly. It has more of the connotation of "being real." Real life is gritty- as much as we want life to be pretty, it just isn't all the time.
Some examples of gritty life- going on a romantic Valentines date with hubby and hitting a deer and smushing car on the way there (happened a few years back.) Or the adorable little girl with a boogery nose. Gritty is what defines real life from storybook life. Gritty is interesting.

(A side note: my house is real gritty, but in a literal sense. There are crumbs underfoot. That is genuine life over here.)

So think about gritty. Have you got any good examples from your own life?