I saw an eight or nine-year-old kid with a birthmark on his eye at my work yesterday. Nothing too unusual. I would have been strange, but I wanted to tell him that it was pretty cool. Because it was. And, at that age, it wouldn't hurt to hear it.
I use the phrase 'it has character' a lot, usually to describe the odd and sometimes half-broken things that surround me, and have interesting stories, or undiscoverable mysteries. What I'm really saying when I praise something as having character is that I find it interestin because it is imperfect. Why rivers are more interesting than irrigation canals, why a real leaf is more interesting than a model, and why reality is more interesting than a computer simulation.
I wonder sometimes at the harm of comparing ourselves to an ideal. Where does it come from? Religious often have a divine image to which they have to aspire. Even evolutionary biologists work from a point that assumes a 'most reproductive' individual, and compares variation in a population to them implicitly (and those many who misinterpret it, with incredible foresight and smugness, often lay out exactly what they believe an individual needs to thrive and survive)
If I were to design a personality test, I think one criteria would be: Do you measure distance from the ideal as a negative or as a positive. Do you see your flaws as making you worse than a template, or better? I guess you can figure that I fall into the latter.
(Maybe that just illuminates their faith in expertise? also: What about distance from the mean?).
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