Loving Would Be Easy If Your Colors Were Like My Dreams, Red, Gold, And Green, Red, Gold, And Green

--"Kharma Chameleon", Culture Club

I have ever been the fan of homages. It seems everything I do in some small part at least honors somebody I know. For a variety of different interests and topics, for whatever reason, I find it simply easier to appropriate people I know or, at the very least, their interests into a lot of what I do.

I believe it started in fourth grade when I created my own calendar--don't ask--and named all the months after my friends. They didn't ask to be included on my little project. I also don't know how honored they were to be included. But it made me feel good to put the people I liked into something I put together. The ball just got rolling from there. Now there's just certain givens when it comes to working on certain projects. For instance, on almost every short story I write now there's a character named Rachel in honor of Rachel Joy Scott, whose story really touched me. This Rachel inevitably turns out to be what I picture the real life Rachel Joy to have been like--honest, caring, sweet. Speaking of which, my new car's middle name, Joy, is because of her too. Another huge source of inspiration is anything Story Girl/Avonlea related. I mean--there's a whole plethora of objects and pieces of writing that had their genesis in the world L.M. Montgomery created. I started a 'zine back in college called Our Magazine simply because that was the name of the literary journal the cousins started in that series of book. I named more than a few characters of mine with the last name Carlisle, which just happens to be the village where King Farm is located. Not to mention--for the longest time I adopted red and blue as my favorite colors simply because everyone--and I mean everyone--either wore blue or red on the show.

That brings me to my main point. I believe the biggest way I honor people is that I tend to adopt certain colors as belonging to certain people. Most of the time it's people's favorite colors or professed favorite colors. Sometimes, though, it's just the color I tend to associate with them most of the time. For instance, I've never met a single other person who has had orange as their favorite color besides Breanne. In that case, orange is just her color simply because no one else will take it. In other cases, I get the sense that a person feels strongly identified with a color like delftwaves' affiliation for blue and white. Because of that I always think of her as belonging to blue. Having established those parameters it was simple for me to design monograms to denote which one of us would be writing that day's post by keying off these color considerations. I myself have had green as a favorite color for years now so that's where my emblem comes in. Yet whenever I take a gander at the orange B or the blue D that begins a post here I get a sense of what to expect right away--moreso than seeing the familiar koala or wave cresting that accompanies the insignias.

It is with that reasoning that I decided to keep a bit of my favorite people with me when I move to my new place. My living room I'm having painted orange to acknowledge a certain someone's contributions to my life. I imagine it to look a little something like this:



My bedroom I'm painting green for me. But my bathroom will be painted blue--well, a bluish teal as my friend Slicks suggested--in commemoration of my other good friend Toby. And I imagine that to look a little like this:



By painting my place these colors it isn't like I believe I'm bringing a part of them into my home. It's more like when I wear my Red Sox gear. When people see the distinctive blue and red hues of my favorite team they immediately know my affiliation as for as baseball teams go. That's all I'm trying to accomplish by doing my walls up the colors that some of my friends have. I want people who know me and know them to realize that they're a part of my life a lot of the time. That's why I'm not painting some far-off corner orange or a closet door blue; I'm painting entire rooms those colors because it's only fitting people know that they're a part of my everyday life, not just my weekend life or whatever folks may think our friendship is like.

Choosing a color for one's place is a bit like choosing who one associates with. In either case, it's safe to say that the choices I've made are choices that have an impact on me for the rest of my life... which doesn't bother me one bit.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers