Curse of the Pink Shirt

Many years ago (like back in the Southridge days), I had favorite pink, polyester shirt that I wore frequently. And although I really loved the shirt, I noticed that weird things happened when I wore pink, as opposed to other colors. More people talked to me--classmates, random strangers--and when I walked through the quad and the Wilk, I was targeted more by the people handing out flyers and promoting . . . stuff. The difference between the number of flyers I received on pink shirt days versus other color days was disturbing. And I concluded that something about the pink shirt made me seem more approachable--not always my goal in life.

Fast forward to today:

I went to the Cougareat to finish my reading assignment for my next class. I chose the Cougareat because I wanted to be able sit at an actual table and eat while I studied--which isn't possible in most campus study areas. However, since it was 11:00 on Thursday (opposite the Tuesday devotional), the Cougareat was particularly busy. Hoping for some level of seclusion, I chose a small table against the wall on the furthest end of the seating area.

Twenty minutes into to my reading, a guy I've never seen before, asked if he could sit at my table. Of course, I was fine with that. I could see the tables were pretty well full, and I don't care if someone else wants to quietly eat their sandwich at the same table as me.

Unfortanately, this particular person did not eat his sandwich quietly. He asked me what book I was reading. Then he asked about my field of study. Then, of course, I felt obligated to ask him about his life. I tried to return to my book--Language Universals and Linguistic Typology--several times, but Stan, the senior in manufacturing engineering from Colorado who will be working in Seattle for Boeing when he graduates in December, just kept the conversation going. Don't get me wrong, he was a very nice person, and we could probably be friends, but I really needed to finish my reading assignment for my next class.

When I got to class, I was explaining to my classmates why I didn't finish the reading, and I glanced down and realized I was wearing a pink shirt--not the bright polyester one from before, obviously, this one is cotton, baby pink. But pink, nonetheless. And pink is the cursed color when you don't want to make friends. Pink is approachable.

So next time I know I need to study between classes, I will choose my wardrobe more carefully.

School Started Last Tuesday

And although I spent nearly my entire Saturday diligently working on homework, I will be up very late tonight (probably into the early morning hours) finishing assignments for tomorrow.

Yay for graduate school.

(The preferred spelling is actually yea, but so many people confuse yea with yeah that I often choose the more colloquial spellings of yay and ya. And the scriptural yea means something completely different and further adds to the confusion--just in case anyone was questioning my knowledge of the English language. In addition, since the yay spelling resembles the word hooray, it further suits this particular usage.)