Solocrow — One Crow Against the World

Pink Blues [a recently recovered document of collegiate idiocy and fraud]

Posted on June 12th, 2007 by solocrow.
Categories: Fiction, Generic Blatherings.

Whilst looking for an empty sketchbook to tote off to Iceland, I happened upon this essay I wrote in college for a course soporifically called “Creative Nonfiction Writing”. The hilarious part of this essay is that about 45% of it *is* actually fiction; I made up parts of it to complete the assignment [at the last minute of course]. Ha!

And yes, I’m still avoiding the onerous task of packing for this trip.

I’ve never liked the color pink. Never. Not even at that tender age when little girls are constantly inundated with All-Things-Pink, as though this is naturally our favorite color. Call it a failing of my societal-role programming, or a genetic flaw, but I’ve had a secret aversion to pink for as long as I can remember. I say secret, because I found out quickly that my shunning of the designated “girl color” was somehow abnormal. To make matters worse, I liked blue — a “boy color.” I was horrified by the stuffed pink bunnies and bears that seemed to be a gift every year at Christmas or Easter. They always glared at me with their little, hard plastic eyes as though they knew I made a distasteful face at them when I climbed into my bed at night. A greater sacrilege to me was the not-so-infrequent placing of blue eyes on some members of the menagerie of fluffy beasties. I would pry these glistening bits of sky from the reprehensible pink carcasses, thinking of myself as a liberator, a righter of incomprehensible wrongs. I would blame the dog, my brother, or mysterious forces of nature when confronted with the eyeless pink monstrosities. I stockpiled blue eyes under my bed and pulled them out to gaze at them forlornly, as though they represented some secret world I would never be allowed to enjoy. My pink aversion didn’t stop with fuzzy animals — it was all encompassing — clothes, food, toys, and crayons were all subject to my secret color editing process. I envied my brother more than any other person on the planet. He had blue everything. My parents didn’t understand, or maybe, they just didn’t notice.

One of the items that I coveted with excessive zeal was my brother’s pair of Star Wars underwear. They were the Holy Grail of my childhood. I knew of the sanctity of underwear — the most private possession of any seven year-old. Of course, mine were pink, or at the very least, covered in some procession of All-Things-Pink. Not my brother’s underwear, oh no, not for him! He had the starry heavens complete with starships and Darth Vader heads to gird his loins. To make matters worse, he seemed unaware of the magnitude of this celestial gift. I couldn’t stand it — so one day, I stole them out of his room.

I was immediately infused with bliss and serenity. I reverently dressed that morning, smiling inwardly at my daring. I had to endure some pink outer garment, of course, but that made little difference now — I was imbued with Star Wars superpower — the power of cerulean swirls and stars! How could boys take this for granted? I climbed into the school bus that morning strutting gleefully. I played hard on the playground at recess, again, somehow invigorated by the magical property of the stolen underwear. The sky smiled down upon me benevolently, content with the success of my clandestine achievement. I ran, giggled, tumbled, and frisked with unadulterated joy. The air was cleaner, grass was softer, indeed, it seemed that everything was better that day.

At that time, I attributed my heightened senses to my brother’s underwear. Later, I realized that my unbounded joy stemmed from something else entirely. It wasn’t the pilfered underwear; it was the sudden seizure of power they represented. I had thrown off the fetters of All-Things-Pink. I had made a choice to eschew the normal, to instead violate one of the most personal possessions of another to redress the injustice I felt at having to comply with what was expected. It was power. I had grasped onto my inner workings in no uncertain terms that day. It was a freedom that no one could revoke, even long after the mandate from on high to return the stolen underwear.

Today, I have made a tentative peace with pink things. As an artist, I can appreciate its uses. I can’t say that it’s my favorite color by any stretch of the imagination, but it has lost some of the nefarious pall that it possessed when I was young. Part of me still envisions pink as a representation of the confining beliefs of others, but another part can see that pink was a threshold I crossed — one that eventually opened up entire universes of personal choices. My pink blues are over, but I realize that if I had never endured them I would not be able to remove the rose-colored glasses that grace the faces of those who unblinkingly accept the visions and expectations of others to the detriment of their own private joys.

*sighs* So amazingly bad, and yet, I still made an A. *evil smirk*

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