Tuesday, June 14, 2005

synaesthesia now??

It's ridiculous, ridiculous I tell you, for me to start this catalogue that I'm about to start for you at this time of night. But I feel like I need to ride these blog impulses, because sometimes I sit in front of this blog, and I really want to write something, but there's nothing in my mind but things like, "And then I was thirsty, but water didn't sound good, so I was like, maybe tea? But we were out of tea. Not totally out, but out of the good kind..." etc.

The colors of the days of the week in the calendar a couple of posts below are very close to the colors I see in the synaesthetic way for the days of the week. And I thought that in that vein I would tell you about my color and gender and personality associations for each letter in the alphabet. I will use the colors I have access to here, but they may not be close enough, so I'll describe the difference.

A is a girl, straightlaced - no surprise, there. "A" Student.
B is a warmhearted, fat, male-to-female transsexual who loves to make pancakes.
C is a popular girl, but 2nd in command, S's toady.
D is a boy, quiet, flies under the radar. Studious.
E is an irritating boy, a non-stop un-funny wisecracker.
F is a girl, just a tad prissy, with a voice that sounds like she has braces.
G is an extremely popular boy, student body president, loved by peers and adults, both. He's got a firm handshake.
H is a boy, very literary and well-read. Okay, he's pretentious.
I is a boy, an offbeat, groovy musican with a dry sense of humor.
J is a boy, similar to D (they're friends), but a touch more athletic and popular.
K Here we have a female-to-male transsexual, who looks feminine and acts quietly macho. Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry is a classic K.
L is a quiet, churchgoing girl who needlepoints.
M is a brassy, masculine woman - but not a transsexual! Bette Midlerish.
N is an effeminate, but not transsexual, but maybe gay boy, who reads poetry and is very literary, but is not overbearing and pretentious like H.
O There's an O there, and he/she is white, which is why it looks like there isn't an O, and totally androgynous. A spacey ballerina/ballerino!
P is a guy and everybody loves him. Loyal, funny, life of the party.
Q is a golden, ladylike man.
R is a preppy boy, wearing a dark green and white striped rugby shirt.
S What a bitch! S is the queen of 8th grade, and she will trip you.
T is a girl, an exchange student from Spain. Very artistic.
U is a boy, very political, an activist, but somewhat quiet.
V is a boy, a complete fop. Vintage! Velvet!
W is a boy, friends with R. They're pretty interchangeable, really.
X is a boy, great friends with H. Who can talk louder? H can. Who's funnier? X is. X has more crossover appeal.
Y is a boy, a hippie skateboarder with blond hair.
Z is another boy, a musician again, like I, but I is funnier. I has short hair and Z has long hair. Z and Y agree, "It's all good." They reaffirm that with each other all the time.

8 comments:

l. said...

holy shit. i do this. except with numbers. or, at least i did as a kid. i sucked at math, and distracted myself imagining soap opera plots featuring the sordid love triangle between ingenue 6, good-guy 5 and bad-boy 7.

people's names had colors, too. i can't do that one much anymore, but i do remember that kathy is hot pink.

Jason Grote said...

I used to think I was so creative because I always imagined letters having colors, but then I realized that they matched those plastic fridge letters from the 70s almost exactly.

Red: A, S
Orange: B, H, T
Yellow: C, N, U, Z
Green: D, G, J, P, V
Blue: E, M, W
Purple: F, L, O, R
White: I
Brown: K, Q, X
Pink: Y

My name is two different shades of green.

Jason Grote said...

Also, hi. Your blog is fantastic. I don't really know you but I've been trying to weasel into that whole Seattle-in-NY theater crowd for months now. So I feel lie I know you, for no reason at all really.

Tina Rowley said...

Thanks! Right back to you, really. It's funny with the letter thing. Once a letter is ensconced in a word, then they don't all retain their individual colors. The colors of a couple of letters will dominate. Like H, H really mutes out a lot of other colors. That H-ey brown will really dominate.
A stands strong, E does, too, usually. I's always black. And sometimes a color will stay, like the red of the A in 'black', but it will get very transparent, as if the red were standing very far away in the fog.

Rach said...

that is so cool! i do that too. i work in an office surrounded by letters and numbers, and i get stupidly bored, so i make stuff up like that.

a wicked post!

David said...

i love this blog. of course, i'm your brother, so that's no great surprise, but there it is... :)

and i love this post. and i concur pretty much 100% down the line. go easy on H though. even if he is maybe a touch subconsciously arrogant, just maybe, at being a Harvard man (if you think him a Harvard man, like I do), remember he genuinely means well. i know that H on his letterman gear looms pretty big like his voice, but he's not so bad at heart. not as i know him.

Eve said...

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/11/27/duffy/index.html

Anonymous said...

Does anyone know why Patricia Lynne Duffy's book on synesthesia--called "Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color their Worlds" (Henry Holt & Company 2001) isso expensive? (from $60--$130 online!)

It's the first book about synesthesia by a synesthete, but still...