color me clueless

Recently, I spoke with a female friend in the midst of planning out the repainting of her apartment. All the rooms would be white on three walls, she told me, with the fourth a different color in each. She then proceeded to list off the colors for various rooms – the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom – hoping to give me a sense of what the final results might look like. And while I nodded my head in understanding as she went through the list, expressed appreciation for the keen visual sense it clearly evidenced once she had recited through them all, I must admit I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

In short, we guys suck at color names. Sure, we might be able to tell you that ‘cerulean’, ‘periwinkle’, ‘aquamarine’ and ‘robin’s egg’ are all shades of blue; but if you were to line up four color samples, there’s not a chance in hell we’d be able to figure out which is which.

The problem, I suspect, stems from our Crayola’d youth. While most girls had the six-thousand crayon pack (the one with the little built in sharpener), we guys had the eight crayon standard. Inevitably, we’d even lose one, and not know the name for ‘orange’ until our early teens.

At which point, even if we were to studiously review every crayon out there, we’d still be doomed to fall horribly behind. Because, once high school rolled around, girls began to pore through the J.Crew catalog, the Banana Republic or L.L.Bean. And while we were just beginning to wrap our minds around the difference between ‘orange yellow’ and ‘yellow orange’, girls were contemplating ‘heather’, ‘oatmeal’ and ‘burnt sienna’.

Sure, a few lucky guys have caught up – graphic designers, for example, or professional painters. But even for them, I suspect it’s a bit like learning a foreign language; no matter how good your Swahili, you’ll never truly sound or think quite like a native speaker.

In other words, for even our best and brightest, we guys are pretty much a lost cause. We’d blush with embarrassment about it, but, frankly, we’re not entirely sure what color we’re supposed to turn.

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breaking up

For years, I thought that ‘love’ was just the far end of the ‘like’ spectrum. If I was dating a girl and really enjoyed spending time with her, really liked her a lot, I would start to ask myself, “am I in love? Is this enough ‘like’ to push me all the way into ‘love’ territory?”

Then, about a year back, I fell in love. I mean, Love with a capital L. And I realized that ‘like’ and ‘love’ were two completely different things. Getting emails from this girl would knot my stomach. I’d lie awake at night thinking about her. Whole poems, whole songs worth of lyrics, suddenly seemed relevant and personal and amazingly true.

Six months later, due to age difference (she was reaching the point where we’d walk by a Baby Gap and she’d unconsciously veer towards the door) and geographic distance, we broke things off. Which, while sad, was the right thing to do.

But now, when I go out on a date, I’m looking for something completely different than I was before. Not a girl I really, really like. Not a girl I can try and convince myself could be the one if I would just stop being so selfish or commitment-phobic or whatever else. But a girl I could love. Really love.

Which, frankly, makes dating in New York rather tough. The Big Apple is a lonely city, one with an overwhelming singles scene that makes the comfort of ‘really, really like’ a hard thing to give up. Even if, in the search for Love with a capital L, it’s the right thing to do.

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karmic circle

While waiting to meet a friend outside the restaurant where we’d be having dinner, I ended up chatting briefly with a gentlemen visiting NYC from Arizona, recommending several tourist attractions as well as the restaurant at which I was about to dine (the lovely Caff

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calling it

After tonight’s California Gubernatorial Recall Debate, my predictions:
– McClintock drops down to Schwarzenegger’s running mate, unifying the Republican vote.
– Camejo and Huffington stay in, however, fracturing the liberal vote.
– As a result, Bustamente loses to Schwarzenegger/McClintock by a narrow margin.

It pains me to think we’d be seeing essentially a state-level repeat of Nader’s swaying the Gore vs. Bush presidential election. Once and we liberals are na

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musical tip

If you go for a little over a year without cleaning a trumpet, you’ll probably be absolutely amazed by the sheer volume of gunk that comes out when you finally do.

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moratorium

On a slightly lighter note: this past weekend, I spent about an hour going through my overflowing bookshelves, weeding out those books I knew I’d not read again but might be able to put to good use at the New York Public Library. In the process, I not only pulled nearly fifty donatable tomes, but also some twenty-six other books I had either not finished or never even started, but would still really love to read.

Resultingly, I’ve consolidated those twenty-six onto a single shelf, and have effected a new-book purchase moratorium until I plow through those plucked lost gems. Based on the way I scarf down books, I don’t expect that to take more than a couple of weeks.

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pondering the pandemic

Yesterday evening, I attended the gala awards dinner for the New York AIDS Film Festival. As impressed as I was by the lineup of films and directors, I was impressed (or, rather, caught off guard) even more by several simple statistics presented.

With the efficacy of exceedingly expensive drug cocktails, the issue of AIDS, at least in my own sheltered world, had been remarkably out of sight and out of mind. So I couldn’t have told you that, already, over 25 million people have died from AIDS. That AIDS has left more than 15 million children orphaned. That some 40 million people are currently HIV positive. Or that, by 2010, 60 million more are expected to contract HIV.

Sixty million more. At some point during dinner, it occurred to me that number is more than ten times those killed in the Holocaust. At that point, I suddenly felt horribly ashamed of myself. At some level, I had always believed that, had I been alive at the time, I would have actively worked against the Holocaust. Had I been living in America at the time, I would have pushed our country, and the rest of the world, towards facing such a clear problem, even if it was easier to ignore it completely until it was much too late.

Yet, here I was, hiding from a problem literally ten times the magnitude. What exactly had I done about it? What exactly will I do about it now?

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