1. Solitary filled with all of your worldly possessions would be an intensely self-actualizing experience.
   
2. A mud park. Mud slides, mud pies, mud tires: sprinklers everywhere.
   
3. An orchard is just the Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of fruits where Mother Nature is Gene Wilder.
   

I told a friend he had to stop pilfering all of my pens and pencils. He pulled out his new rainbow set of pens and told me I could have a few as recompense. He pointed to the pink one and said “You can definitely have that one.”

Why not the pink one? If he wanted a set of highly visible inks, wouldn’t he have bought some black rollerballs? Is he embarrassed to be seen using a pink pen? What’s so embarrassing about a color?

What is so embarrassing about a color?

Blue is the color of water-bodies (and so much else); its meaning can’t be manipulated much because we already associate it with many things. Pink is fairly uncommon in nature, and thereby is more mouldable by businesses and social movements: without preexisting stuff to associate to pink, people have much more freedom to decide what pink SHOULD mean.

There are not that many naturally-occuring pink things. But there are some:

Flowers
Tourmaline, Spinel, and Other Gemstones
Flamingos
Axolotls
Triboniophorus Affinis Graeffei (aka Giant Pink Slug. Good one, evolution.)
The Pink Lake
Sunsets
Seashells
Apples
Underripe Strawberries
Dragonfruit
Lips, Cheeks, and Other Fleshy Things

…Or, the shorthand version:

Flowers
Fruits
Things in Australia

NPR blamed marketing for gendering pink. But I think pink kind of already had it coming. Pink is tied down to the real world by things of a sensuous nature (sights, smells, textures, tastes, etc.). If pink is inherently sensuous, and we deeply associate feminineness to sensuousness (not that we should, per se, but that we do)…transitive property?

[Aside: Aradhna Krishna differentiates sensuousness from the sexual connotation we often ascribe to it, calling it anything “of or related to the senses.” She deserves credit for my self-discovery as a sensuist: I experience and appreciate sensory experiences more strongly than most.]

Step 1: Pick an emoji, and write down what it is.
Step 2: Open a different emoji tab, then repeat Step 1.
Step 3: Repeat Step 2.
Step 4: Combine everything you just wrote.
Step 5: Input your new password.

(Just don’t use “dragoncherrytractor”: it’s too obvious.)

We sat in a circle, legs crossed, passing around a flimsy sandwich bag of folded notes. I drew mine and waited. The boy next to me was already reading his: something with the word “Trashy”.

I opened mine.

All Big Releases

Like,

A yawn
A sneeze
An orgasm
Turning off the vacuum
When the wasabi stops burning
When you realize you’re all alone
Nighttime
Seeing a friend that you haven’t seen in a long time
Cutting the first slice of cake
Letting your hair down
Popping anything
Pooping everything
Falling asleep
Crying
Saying I love you
Breaking a rubber band
When the timer goes off
When the power goes out
When you lose
When you win
Saying goodbye
Showering off your sweat
Cracking a glow-stick
Blowing an incredible bubble-gum bubble
Jumping in
Coming up for air
Death
A deep breath

More as I think of them.

I waited on Ross’ third-floor as cables gently whirred behind the elevator doors. To the left of every set of doors is a panel that can only be likened to shutter shades; it is backlit and a ring plays when that elevator will be the next to arrive. To the right of every set of doors is a floor length mirror. Like this:

As I’m sure nearly every Ross elevator-user is wont to do, I put myself in front of the mirror to study myself while I waited. And as soon as the doors opened, I realized that I had just done the following.

I had moved myself out of the way of the doors (and thereby a potential out-goer’s way) without thinking! My ego had nudged me to the left just a couple of feet, and someone had designed it so. Cool.

p.s. FiftyThree never ceases to amaze. Sketched these up on their new phone app, and am still mid-exploration of the new iPad-version features.

I have been asking these questions for-seemingly-ever to seemingly-everyone without satisfactory reply. Riddle me these:

1. It is socially acceptable to wear underwear in public, IFF it’s waterproof.

2. Adding an egg to a food turns it into a breakfast food (*see breakfast burrito).

3. The word “hardly” doesn’t make sense.

If I were an art professor, I’d make a “Watermelon Project.” The students would walk into class and see a table piled high with watermelons and a spread of kitchen knives of various sizes and styles. They would have the whole class period to use their watermelons to explore shape and space, and they would have to present something to the class at the end of the period. Some students might build structures, some might experiment with geometry, some might paint watercolours with the juice, some might carve stamps out of the rind, some might photograph themselves eating it…

When The Outer Layer is Practically The Best Part
- Pie
- Muffins
- Brownies
- Pizza
- Rolls
- Bagels
- Mac and cheese
- Fried chicken

When The Outer Layer is Way Worse Than What’s Inside
- The butts of a loaf of bread
- The cheese rind

I’ve always been a fan of the Seth Macfarlane version of “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” But for the first time yesterday, I listened to the version by Nat King Cole.

Listen to the way he pronounces “you’re.”

It’s more like “youer” as opposed to the more colloquial “your” pronunciation.

And this changes everything! It’s more poetic: the lyrics are far more assonant and parallelized. If you take another listen, you’ll hear it. And like how performing Shakespeare in the original pronunciation matters, it more accurately reflects the speech patterns of its time (early-ish 1900s). As a contraction for “you are” and written as “you’re,” the natural, phonological drift towards sounding like “your” probably just happened with time. 

Of course, I can’t blame Seth for singing in his own accent. But isn’t it a wonderful surprise to learn something new about something you thought you knew?