Vanity has reached new heights. I have a friend considering buttocks implants.

“It’s really nothing,” she says. “They just remove a little inner thigh and stick it in my rump.”

Nothing she says? Surgically altering her derriere to make her the only eastern European Jew with a ghetto booty or should we say Shtetl booty?

Time was when a trip to Dunkin’ Donuts, then Chick-fil-A and back to Dunkin’ Donuts again would give you the posterior of your dreams. But we as a nation, and particularly as a school, have looked conventional forms of vanity in the eye and strive for even higher standards of beauty.

It has even affected me, your homely humor columnist. Back in the day I was “Sloppy Sarah,” content to run around in grade school with one shoulder of my uniform tunic unbuttoned, bloused bosom hanging in the breeze. OK, so I didn’t get bosoms ’til basically right before college, earning me the appellation “No-boobs Nir,” and several inquiries as to the nature of my sex, but you get the idea.

I always wore two different colored socks – largely due to the strange taste I acquired for lead paint chips that rendered me temporarily colorblind and with a penchant for blurting out profanity at my daycare providers – but I thought I was the pinnacle of perfection. Little did I know that what I deemed as my crowning attribute – my three foot long hair – was in fact more Rasta than Rapunzel.

That in my past, I am now slightly more self-aware and significantly more vain, but aren’t we all? What person doesn’t check themselves out in every mirror, puddle and spoon-back? What would the GW community do if not for that ingenious piece of one-way glass next to Fulbright Hall by the parking garage? Sorry to break it to you garage employees, while you are panting on the other side of that window – all that protracted staring and sucking in of stomachs that streams by you daily is the GW community hitting on itself.

Hey, I’m not throwing stones. I too am an accomplice of this beauty barrage. I have naturally straight hair. Yes it dries stick straight, lying like a dead, highlighted ferret on my head no matter the temperature, humidity. However, this being said, I straighten my hair. And I don’t know why. It’s basically like beating a dead horse. My eyebrows, too, fall victim to vanity.

For some reason they have an irresistible urge to wrap their furry little arms around each other and fuse in a Bert (of Bert and Ernie)-esque union. Despite their nightly forays towards each other, each morning I viciously pluck to maintain the virginal skin above my nose and beat back my brows, battling against their pure animal magnetism.

Then there are the obvious efforts we all make, keeping fit and eating right or not at all. I right now am on the all sushi diet. However, I am seriously considering switching to soup. It’s really difficult to check yourself out in the back of a chopstick.