A couple years ago I got to know people by asking their favorite color. It’s an icebreaker, and it’s a way to know somebody, slightly. I believe in auras and favorite colors can apply to that, although not always. My favorite color is pink. That speaks to my more girly, fashion-oriented and materialistic side. My romantic side. My roommate’s favorite color is orange, which makes sense to me because he likes to be loud and outgoing and sometimes it’s kind of annoying but usually it’s a positive thing. Most of my pot-smoking friends say “green” for obvious reasons. Blue is calm, but deep. It reminds me oceans and my ocean-eyed boyfriends. My friends that say their color is blue are generally easy going and have interesting views on life, whether negative or positive. Yellow, depending on the shade, applies to my bright, optimistic friends. Red is a more passionate version of orange. My brother’s favorite color is red. He likes to be strong and macho but also has his sweet moments, when his buds aren’t around. He’s grown up now, but I still remember when his favorite color was “bubblegum.”
Your favorite color doesn’t really need to say anything about you. It doesn’t have to be analysis of the deeper parts of your personality, and this idea is mostly based on stereotypes and my experiences with my friends and their favorite colors. Or their lack there-of. Some of my friends didn’t have a favorite color and tended to be worse at decision making, creating plans and following them, but they were content with that. Friends who said they liked all of them were kind of the same way but more optimistic and a little more ADD.
But, really, what do I know?
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Color In DC
Downtown DC is colorless. It’s filled with plain business suits and drained looking people. Bleached white monuments and grey pavement. On the bad days I’m bored. Black secret service cars, the most color you see is homeless peoples’ ragged carts filled with their lifestyles and ambulances’ flashing lights leading to GW hospital. Georgetown, despite all the popular stores like Urban Outfitters is colorless and bland in itself, lacking a lot of diversity in the rich GW students, business suited men going to lunch and the odd hobo begging for change. Most of the time I love DC, especially on sunny days, but I miss large green parks that more people then just drug users and hobos sit in. I miss the blue lagoon across from my house at home. Sometimes I come home from school feeling grey like everyone else in this city and I don’t question the fact that Washington was rated one of the ugliest cities in the US. Everyone’s stressed and tired all the time, and I felt most at home when driving with the windows open on a sunny, windy, warm day around Arlington Cemetery and the Park Way. Growing up in Wisconsin where fields and farms and trees and hills are plentiful you forget how much you take the color green for granted. Green is the color of things that are alive, and on bad days, Washington, DC is the color of things that are dead.
Issues In Color
Milwaukee, Wisconsin is still one of the most racially segregated cities in the Midwest. A good friend of mine, who’s a Russian immigrant who moved here when he was six, remembers living in Milwaukee in a time when there was still a pretty real Russian district. Even now it’s still easy to tell when you cross cultural lines, whether it’s in the downtown Third Ward White bread part of the city or the darker Marquette university area. Race and color are still a pretty real issue in our society. Being black or white or all the colors in between still creates severe stereotyping, and minorities still make less money then the average white person with the same job. We’re finally at the age when it’s very possible that a black man might be voted president, and the thing that’s still sad is that it took so long.
I grew up at the most diverse high school in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the second most diverse city in Wisconsin after Milwaukee and definitely more integrated, but still relatively white bread compared to most cities of the US. At the end of the year the state newspaper printed quotes and thoughts about graduating from various valedictorians from different Wisconsin high schools. One student talked about how his student body would have to be in much more culturally diverse situations and that would be a big step for them, which honestly was alien to me. The year before that there was a situation at a basketball game where the rich private school started chanting statements remarking on our large poor student body, saying “Food Stamps clap clap Food Stamps” and “Your dad works for my dad.” It of course almost caused a huge fight and I still think those students deserve to get the crap beat out of them. The idea that anyone would think that something like that would be remotely okay just blows me away. I’m saddened by the issues that should already be past, whether its race or genders or homosexuality. All differences should be celebrated, and risking a terrible cliché, like a rainbow.
This past year I painted a mural for my school, which pictured me and two friends, a white girl and a black boy. I’d never really painted anyone of color before, not really because of any reason other then I’ve only really painted self-portraits. Painting my friend was a large challenge. He’s got beautiful chocolate skin and the best smile of anybody I’ve ever met. But you don’t use just browns, but also oranges and pinks and purples. Chocolate has so many amazing shades. I can’t say I was blown away but this discovery, as if African American people are automatically just one color, but I’d never examined anyone’s skin color so closely before, if only just because painting pale skin colors comes naturally since I look at my own pale skin every day. I’m proud to say the murals done by me and my other friends’ displays all different kind of students, colors, beliefs, and lifestyles. We are diverse and I’ll always be proud of where I came from, especially coming from generally White Wisconsin.
I grew up at the most diverse high school in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the second most diverse city in Wisconsin after Milwaukee and definitely more integrated, but still relatively white bread compared to most cities of the US. At the end of the year the state newspaper printed quotes and thoughts about graduating from various valedictorians from different Wisconsin high schools. One student talked about how his student body would have to be in much more culturally diverse situations and that would be a big step for them, which honestly was alien to me. The year before that there was a situation at a basketball game where the rich private school started chanting statements remarking on our large poor student body, saying “Food Stamps clap clap Food Stamps” and “Your dad works for my dad.” It of course almost caused a huge fight and I still think those students deserve to get the crap beat out of them. The idea that anyone would think that something like that would be remotely okay just blows me away. I’m saddened by the issues that should already be past, whether its race or genders or homosexuality. All differences should be celebrated, and risking a terrible cliché, like a rainbow.
This past year I painted a mural for my school, which pictured me and two friends, a white girl and a black boy. I’d never really painted anyone of color before, not really because of any reason other then I’ve only really painted self-portraits. Painting my friend was a large challenge. He’s got beautiful chocolate skin and the best smile of anybody I’ve ever met. But you don’t use just browns, but also oranges and pinks and purples. Chocolate has so many amazing shades. I can’t say I was blown away but this discovery, as if African American people are automatically just one color, but I’d never examined anyone’s skin color so closely before, if only just because painting pale skin colors comes naturally since I look at my own pale skin every day. I’m proud to say the murals done by me and my other friends’ displays all different kind of students, colors, beliefs, and lifestyles. We are diverse and I’ll always be proud of where I came from, especially coming from generally White Wisconsin.
Dark And Light
I never really used to understand why Black and White aren’t technically described as colors, until recently. When I was little, they were still colors in a crayon, so what difference did it make? It was one of those statements like my fourth grade teacher saying, “There’s so such thing as can’t.” Kids can’t take things conceptually. Everything’s so literal. “Can’t” is a word. And that’s that.
Black used to dominate my wardrobe, and now I really understand how devoid of color I really was. Wearing black predominantly makes you look paler then you are and you’re not very approachable, Black doesn’t reflect light, it swallows it.
White, on the other hand, is of course; also colorless but is nothing but light. It tints light instead of takes over it, when mixing paints or pastels.
I used to only draw with charcoal, just black, and maybe some white accents. Painting opened me up to a whole new world of color and understanding and expression. I love skin colors, and how subtle things like veins and blush and shine in the hair. I filled my sketchbooks with acrylics and sharpies, layering colors and cutouts and sketches on top of each other.
Black used to dominate my wardrobe, and now I really understand how devoid of color I really was. Wearing black predominantly makes you look paler then you are and you’re not very approachable, Black doesn’t reflect light, it swallows it.
White, on the other hand, is of course; also colorless but is nothing but light. It tints light instead of takes over it, when mixing paints or pastels.
I used to only draw with charcoal, just black, and maybe some white accents. Painting opened me up to a whole new world of color and understanding and expression. I love skin colors, and how subtle things like veins and blush and shine in the hair. I filled my sketchbooks with acrylics and sharpies, layering colors and cutouts and sketches on top of each other.
Taste, Smell, Feel, See
Red is dry skin, itchy contacts, and too much marijuana on April 20th. Discomfort thrives on the most passionate color, and the most bitter of people would apply that statement to love, romance, paper hearts and Valentine’s Day. But red doesn’t really remind me of any of things. Tomato sauce, yes. Beating heart, blood on the floor, maybe. But not love.
Yellow reminds me of flowers, first. Starting with sunflowers, and of course that connects to the sun, the kind children draw when learning about planet alignment, a yellow circle starburst, usually with sunglasses. We thought we were clever.
Yellow makes me think of the Simpson’s, Jaundice, and ugly upholstered La-Z Boy chairs.
On bad days it reminds me of sickness, of not enough sleep and the stomach flu, like the color my vomit was the day I went to GW hospital.
On better days yellow is the color I wear when I’m feeling well. I like being sunshiny, some days.
Blue is robins’ egg, the sky on clear days but not in places like Seattle or Denver or Beijing where the smog doesn’t let the grey go away. Blue is a newborn infant’s thin, delicate skin with the veins showing through, and my favorite pair of blue jeans. Blue is the southern parts of the oceans, and the color of almost all my boyfriend’s eyes. Strangely enough.
Tomato sauce plus Denim blue equals eggplant, plums, and grapes, a wide range of fruits. Bruises and Welch’s grape juice, violets. Sunflowers plus baby’s veins showing through skin equals wheatgrass and kiwis, cactuses. Live things like to be green. Valentine’s Day and the Simpson’s makes for a quirky television show and citrus-ey things like Oranges and Cough medicine.
Yellow reminds me of flowers, first. Starting with sunflowers, and of course that connects to the sun, the kind children draw when learning about planet alignment, a yellow circle starburst, usually with sunglasses. We thought we were clever.
Yellow makes me think of the Simpson’s, Jaundice, and ugly upholstered La-Z Boy chairs.
On bad days it reminds me of sickness, of not enough sleep and the stomach flu, like the color my vomit was the day I went to GW hospital.
On better days yellow is the color I wear when I’m feeling well. I like being sunshiny, some days.
Blue is robins’ egg, the sky on clear days but not in places like Seattle or Denver or Beijing where the smog doesn’t let the grey go away. Blue is a newborn infant’s thin, delicate skin with the veins showing through, and my favorite pair of blue jeans. Blue is the southern parts of the oceans, and the color of almost all my boyfriend’s eyes. Strangely enough.
Tomato sauce plus Denim blue equals eggplant, plums, and grapes, a wide range of fruits. Bruises and Welch’s grape juice, violets. Sunflowers plus baby’s veins showing through skin equals wheatgrass and kiwis, cactuses. Live things like to be green. Valentine’s Day and the Simpson’s makes for a quirky television show and citrus-ey things like Oranges and Cough medicine.
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