(There's No Such Thing As) The Color Purple

Unless you know what they look like, colors are impossible to describe. A blind person cannot be told—with any degree of accuracy—what the color green looks like. Color is one of those immaterial, “all in our heads” kind of thing. Light strikes an object and bounces off. This light hits our eye and our brain takes this light and interprets color—in a way I so complicated that I may as well call it “magic.” The surfaces of objects determine their color. Simply: whatever color an object is—that’s the wavelength of light the object absorbs the most of, the rest of the colors trapped inside a beam of light is “scattered.” If a surface scatters all wavelengths we see it as white, likewise, if all the wavelengths are absorbed we see black.

There are some people who are blind and see nothing and then there the “color blind.” These people have trouble seeing some colors because of a genetic defect in their eyes. All of this is remarkable and hard to grasp at the same time—in reality an object’s color has more to do with the light that is shining on it AND the person viewing it. For some reason this always reminds me of the classic “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it” question. I realize that all of this is very Zen, and probably bores most people to tears so I’ll get on with it.
Purple.

The word “purple” is a very strange word to me. Besides the numerous connotations to the color (royalty, homosexuality, Easter), there are a number of ideas…concepts or feelings that purple instantly brings to mind. Swollen, vulgar, unlikely, comical, and unhealthy. I think about flowers, of course, and I think about a bruise. Then there’s Barney the Dinosaur and Grimace the…whatever the hell he is over in McDonald’s. Of course, no matter how old I get, I’ll never forget my crazy 4th grade Art Teacher, Miss Whatshername.

In my experience, 99% of all Art Teachers are insane. I’m not talking a “bit-barmy-he-enjoys-opening-umbrellas-indoors”…I’m talking “fucking-nuts-he enjoys-opening-umbrellas-indoors…umbrellas-made-of human-flesh.” My cousin’s wife is an Art Teacher in Kansas, and while she’s a nice, normal sort, I assure you she is the exception to the rule. Art Teachers seem to be living in another world. One where clay speaks (if you know how to listen) and colored pencils should all have names—real names, like Larry or Steve.

After spending five hours mindlessly toiling on worksheets, my 4th grade class would gather our supplies and head to the basement of our school to the “art room.” This room consisted of several long wooden tables, and a few thousand dollars work of Prang watercolors. Oh, and there were drying racks—whole endless rows of drying racks.

Our Art Teacher, Miss Whatshername, would cackle as we entered her domain, like a witch. She usually wore something “Earthy” (think neutral browns, and material made of reeds and burlap sacks). Miss Whatshername had long, grayish hair that was freakishly straight and always wrapped in a do-rag. With her long, bony fingers she’d point us to our seats as we filed into the room.

Miss Whatshername had many peculiarities, but the most startling one was her abject hatred for Purple. This became apparent during our very first meeting when my class sat down to talk about colors. We learned that there are three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue. These colors, when mixed in various ways, make all the other colors of the rainbow.

“What are all the colors?” Miss Whatshername asked us from her perch near the chalkboard.

“Orange,” someone said.

“Good!” Miss Whatshername said. “Orange is red and yellow mixed together!”

“Green!” another one of my classmates shouted.

“Ah yes, Green!” Miss Whatshername exclaimed. “Green is yellow and blue mixed together!”

“Purple.”

There was an icy silence as the smile faded from Miss Whatshername’s lips. She stood up slowly, like a dazed car-crash victim.

“What? What was that?”

No one said a word. You could hear a…crayon drop.

Miss Whatshername shuffled over to the chalkboard and picked up a hunk of white, furiously she began to scribble on the dusty white surface. I can still hear the shrill squeak of her chalk as she wrote. I can close my eyes and still see her flabby, middle-aged arm wobble as she angrily wrote one word, then another.

The two words were PURPLE and VIOLET.

“This,” Miss Whatshername said pointing at the word VIOLET. “Is a color, whereas this word…Purple…this is not a color.”

She looked at both the world Purple on the blackboard and us with a look of disgust. We were dirty and unrefined, and so was Purple. We began to murmur amongst ourselves, the venom in Miss Whatshername’s voice had both frightened and excited us. Was this woman serious? We’d been calling it Purple for years and no one had ever said a word about it not being a color.

And anyway, wasn't Violet a flower?

Someone got the idea to check the Crayon box—the good people at Crayola had our backs: the paper wrapper said “Purple.” When this fact was pointed out to Miss Whatshername, she became even more agitated.

“There is no such color as Purple and in my class, no one will use that term!” she shouted above the giggling din.

Was this woman insane?

“Purple…”

“No!” Miss Whatshername exclaimed. “No Purple!”

This was the first time I ever truly disagreed with a teacher. This instance was the first time a person in authority seemed completely stupid. It wasn’t just that I disagreed with what she was saying (she was correct in a way, “Purple” is a general, Old-English term…whereas “Violet” is the correct term for the color achieved by mixing red with blue), it was the manner in which she carried herself as she said it. What she was saying blew our little 4th grade minds. We’d been taught by both our parents and other teachers to call Violet “Purple.” The terms are essentially interchangeable in the everyday (read: non-art class) world.

This woman, this Miss Whatshername, was just being an intellectual snob.

Of course I didn’t know this at the time, but that’s what she was. Miss Whatshername was too good for the common “Purple.” Instead, the only word she’d “hear” in her class was Violet. Over the course of the year few of us would test her (those brave souls). They’d ask her for a Purple colored pencil, to see if she’d unthinkingly hand them a “Violet” one…thus establishing that the two were, in fact, one and the same. Or they’d ask her if they’d used too much Purple paint in their surrealistic lunchroom painting.

But Miss Whatshername never fell for it. She never took the bait; instead she’s just stare at them dumbly. Most of the time the question was asked twice, then it would be either abandoned or amended (“Violet” instead of “Purple”).

What scares me more than almost anything are people like Miss Whatshername. They’re infinitely more dangerous than people might think. Trapped alone with our children, they take impressionable minds and try to mold them, to bend them into their own specific worldview. Not by reason or explanation, but by the imposition of their dominance and authority.

There is no more reality to the word “Violet” than there is to the word “Purple.” Colors, after all, are really abstract concepts. They’re so abstract that one can’t adequately describe them to a blind person. The colors as we see them might not even exist were we not there to see them. That is how terribly tenuous these words (all words) are. My classmates and I weren’t saying “Apple” for “Rhinoceros,” we were using a less specific word to describe red and blue mixed together. One that was taught and accepted by most of the world—our teacher’s reaction was insane. Teachers should teach, not merely impose their knowledge upon their students.

There is no Purple. There is no Violet.

The Math Closet

I’d like to think that I’m good at expressing myself. Not verbally, mind you, but on paper I’m a pro. Give me a topic and some paper and let me go. I’m not saying that it’s always wondrous, but what I come up with is at the very least interesting. Which is more than a lot of people can say.

Not that I’m picking on anybody. Because you know what? I’m really bad at math. I always have been. Numbers confuse and overwhelm me with frightening ease. Growing up, I was never really very exception in school. My grades were pretty much right down the middle—average vanilla. On paper I looked like a dolt, one of those boring people who grow up to manage a drug-store.

Of course, I could never manage a drug-store…I’m too bad at math for that.

When I was in elementary school, my parents were class room “volunteers.” One of the tasks they were given was, believe it or not—grading papers. My mother would sit up late at night with a big stack of math worksheets and grade my classes’ papers. She would make her way through the stack, and before I could finish a glass of chocolate milk, she’d be tutting and shaking her head at me.

“Oh, Jason,” she’s say holding my latest attempt at division. “You can do better than this.”

So I’d often get to do my class work twice. Once in class and again later at home after it had been half-graded. My poor mother would hover over my shoulder—answer key-in-hand. Thankfully, my mother quit grading my math homework once I changed schools. But by fourth-grade, I was a real loser when it came to math. When my family relocated to a richer, nicer Missouri suburb, my parents were overjoyed to have their kids in one of the best school districts in the State. I was told over and over that my new school was “better” than my old one.

And it was. There was air conditioning and we had two different playgrounds! There was also a different approach to teaching in this “nicer” school. At the beginning of the year, we were all given a mathematics aptitude test. This test, we were told, would place us into special classes where our own individual needs would be addressed.

Children who were better at math would be placed and in a special “accelerated” class, where they wouldn’t be held back by the kids who weren’t as good at math.

Kids like me, who couldn’t add and subtract without using the “magic dots” that I was taught back in my “poor school.”

The "magic dots" are imaginary dots that one can use to help you add and subtract. For example: the number one has one dot. The number two has two. These dots were placed usually at the “joints” of a numeral. The number two had a dot at the “beginning” and the “end,” where your pencil would touch and then leave the page as you scrawled the number. As a result of this rather ridiculous system, my math homework was covered with little flecks of graphite, where I’d nervously tap my pencil.



This system greatly hampered my ability to take the “timed tests” of my new “rich” school. Unlike the other kids, who’d been taught memorization, I was forced to use my tactile method. The process was slow, very, very slow. Not only was I nearly always the last one to finish these timed tests, but often the room would be empty when I did so. My classmates were outside at recess or at art class. Once, I was forced to sit out of a special movie because it took me the length of the animated version of “Charlotte’s Web” to finish my test.

This was, as you can imagine—embarrassing. But nothing was as embarrassing as the “math closet.”

You see, my math aptitude test put me in a special group. There were five of us total, and we were the worst of the worst. Like a “Dirty Dozen” of dunces. The rest of the fourth-grade was divided up into four classes. Once a day, we’d all break off into our math groups and have a separate math classes. Each group met in a different room. Separate but equal (my ass).

My group, the dunce group didn’t meet in a classroom and we didn’t have a regular teacher. Instead, we had a "student" teacher, a pretty college girl who looked both excited and terrified to be dealing with us. Our class was conducted in, I shit you not—a fucking broom closet.

The student teacher (whose name eludes me) had a dry erase board leaning against one of the closet walls. We (the five of us) sat cross-legged on the cold tile floor and stared dumbly up at her as she tried to teach us basic math.

I’ve been in remedial math classes every since.

I don’t blame my parents or the “math closet” for my lack of math skills. Every since I can remember I’ve been bad at math, it’s just a fact of life for me. Like how I have blue eyes or brown hair. I don’t think any of the schools I went to could have changed it for me either, except perhaps for my first elementary school, who taught me that crippling “magic dot” bullshit.

They weren't the cause necessarily, but they sure as hell didn't help.

In Junior High, the remedial math classes were full of burnouts, druggies, and really hot goth chicks. Goth chick’s aside, it sucked. The people in these classes were, for the most part in them because they had behavioral problems. I wasn't like them, I just honestly couldn’t wrap my brain around mathematical concepts.

Instead of a classroom where I could receive special help, I was placed in a room full of misfits who tortured our teachers. Rather than help kids like me, they were constantly putting out psychotic episodes.

Like the kid who famously mumbled “I’m gonna kill you faggot” under his breath and stared at you with those piercing, serial killer eyes of his. If the Jason of today was in that classroom right now—well I’d probably break his fucking nose—instead I would just stare at my spiral notebook and try to understand why I wasn’t getting algebra.

In college, I continued my remedial track all the way up to graduation day at USML, where I got my Bachelor’s Degree. Since I’ve graduated, they’ve increased the standards for math so high that like my parents, I don’t think I could graduate High School (let alone college) if I was a student today. I don’t think I could get through all the math requirements.

My kid sister is like me, but unlike me—she’s getting help. My parents take her to a tutor and they give her homework outside the homework assigned to her at school. She hates it, like I’m sure I would have too, but I’m glad my folks are making her do it. Math is important, besides being confusing, and you need it to survive in today’s world.

That said, I’ve never need Geometry or Calculus (I don’t even know what that is), but I use basic addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication everyday at work. My mental math has actually improved a bit, and I’m shocked to find myself remembering basic algebra concepts on occasion.

Of course, I sometimes still use the “magic dots.” And I can’t help but shudder every time I pass a broom closet.

Poems You'll Never Read in English Class, Part 1

After Jason’s post last week about poetry, I started thinking about poems and how, many years ago, I tried writing some. This lasted about as long as my flirtations with jogging or dieting, and the results were equally disastrous. Over the years, I’ve gone back to dabble in poems, and these are just a few that serve as lessons as to why my hands should be chopped off and I should never be allowed to write again.

1.

Scraping himself against backyard grass

our new young puppy does wipe his ass.

And though sometimes it gives me the squirms,

it’s much preferred over seeing his worms.

2.

HALLOWEEN

At eight years old I just wanted candy

And in my costume I looked quite dandy,

But at the neighbor’s house just down the street,

Waiting for a witch’s free tasty treat,

I opened my bag to receive her gift

But instead got dinner mints, petty thrift.

So, surprised, I turned away from the witch

And, walking home, called her a cheap old bitch.

3.

My father told me to bring him a bucket,

And when I did, he took out the mop.

He wet the head, but decided to stop,

And, leaving the kitchen, said “Fuck it.”

Crappy Poetry Makes Me Cry “Grape-flavored Teardrops”

When it came time to pick a major there was really only two choices for me—English or History. So I did the sensible thing and chose History (on the basis that I couldn't make any money with an English degree!). I ended up going back to English after just one semester as a History major.

My reason for switching?

I didn't have to read or write as much as an English major (and yes, I’m perfectly aware of the irony in that statement). What people don’t realize is that History majors read a TON of books and write a TON of papers. In the one semester that I was a History major I was expected to write twice the amount of papers that I did my second year as an English major.

But it wasn't just laziness that brought me back—I had a few encouraging teachers that told me I should make the switch, and I missed reading novels for homework.

However, there was one thing that discouraged me from coming back to the English department.

Poetry.

I know this is going to sound really bad, but I hate poetry. At least, I hate the academic definition of poetry. Which by the way, what is that again?

One of the pitfalls of poetry is that just about anything COULD be poetry. It really just depends on how liberal your instructor is.

Poetry (as defined by Wikipedia): is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Which basically means “pretty words chosen because they sound good, look good on paper, and will make the writer appear smart.”

Bonus points if the reader has no FUCKING CLUE what the exact message the author is trying to convey.

If it were a sport, Poetry would be Cricket. It’s needlessly complicated and aristocratic at its worse—and childish and unintelligent at its best.

I always catch hell for this belief, and I can understand that…most people have poetry shoved so far down their throats that they have it coming out their rectum. But the truth of the matter is, an appreciation for poetry is like an appreciation for cod liver oil. And just like cod liver oil, we ingest poetry because we’re told its “good for us.”

Prose is a superior medium to enlighten and convey ideas. Prose can be “poetic” in nature, but rarely is it as obtuse and maddening as 99.999% of the poetry I was forced to read. I’ve read books and novels with footnotes…but some of the poetry that I was forced to read in college required footnotes that often HAD footnotes.

I’m not even joking.

And don’t get me started on the poems whose footnotes were LONGER THAN THE ACTUAL POEM. When you’re in school, and you’re dealing with this strange/difficult to understand dribble…you often feel quite stupid. Poetry is often like a foreign language—you recognize some of the words, but the meaning is obscured behind fancy layer after layer of dual meaning and double entendre.

Now, just because something makes you feel stupid doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad (after all, you may just be stupid, right?). But if there’s one thing that Creative Writing classes have taught me (and Creative Writing has taught me more than just one thing) it’s that sometimes/most times NOT EVEN THE POET KNOWS WHAT THE HELL HIS/HER POEM IS ABOUT.

You have no idea how many times I’d sit there and listen to someone say they didn’t know what their poem was about. Of course, the rest of the class (and the teacher) had opinions about this. They’d claim to “know” what the poem was about. And the author would nod and agree. And just like that, the meaning of the poem was “decided.”

I often wonder how many of the “great” works in the poetry canon have been treated in just this manner. Picture it: some 17th century dude, drunk off his ass on Absinthe is just trying to get laid. So he writes a sloppy, drunken love letter to a courtesan he knows. She of course is a typical woman, and saves EVERYTHING. The letter gets passed down through the years AND BOOM! I’m stuck in British Lit II trying to figure out what the hell it all means.

Just because a guy was drunk and horny—he didn’t have any aim other than getting past a few chastity belts.

And yet I have to pay for his lechery.

No other literary medium can say that MORE PEOPLE ENJOY WRITING IT THAN READING IT. But it’s true. After all, how often do you sit down and read poetry? Exactly. Poetry was a fad that’s come and gone. If you stop and think about it, poetry is a lot like the messages on Twitter. Short and concise, the “Tweets” are mostly written by drunk guys trying to get laid.

Just like poetry.

Alright, time to retract some of that hate (after all I was an English major). There are some great poems, and some pretty good poets…but for the most part, I hated studying poetry. I hated feeling my eyes glaze over after the 150th line of free verse.

But I’ve saved the worse for last—when I was younger I too dabbled in the dark art of poetry. This is a shameful part of my literary career, one that I’m going to bravely share with you in the hopes of preventing such tragedy from every occurring again.

Bad poetry is all too common. Please, don’t judge me too harshly…

Grape-Flavored Teardrops

A poem by Jason Wendleton (age 17)

It’s so cool and pure,

It’s so sweet

It can be so very, very sweet.

With a spring in the step

And the shuffle in your feet.

The smile on your face says

It all: Life can be so sweet.

As you flock to the sunshine

Wave to the people that you meet.

‘Cos like a grapeflavored teardrop,

Life is both sad and sweet.

Sad and sweet,

Get to know them both.

Sad and sweet,

Life’s both so sad—and sweet.

It’s so sweet.

Yikes. See what I mean? Poetry sucks.

BONUS:

Geography

The class was supposed to be a “blow-off,” the kind you barely attend but still get an “A” because the material is so basic. Of course I got more than I bargained for. That’s pretty much the theme running through my life.

The class was taught by a middle-aged professor, I wish I could remember his name but frankly, he wasn’t a tenured instructor and his name wasn’t even printed on my schedule. He was what’s known as a “neo-hippy.” Unlike most Geography teachers, he’d actually been all over the world and was full of interesting anecdotes about the various places we studied that semester.

Of course, this was Community (aka “Junior”) College so somebody had to ask the question that was on all of our minds.

“Why are you in a wheelchair?”

I remember cringing and staring down at my desktop. I’ve only been to a few Community Colleges, but they seemed to be filled with the absolute dumbest people on the planet. The people just smart enough to maybe attend college—but dumb enough to not realize that they had a choice in the matter. Most of them acted like they were still in High School, which is why I wasn’t too surprised when someone blurted such a sensitive question.

I mean, what did it matter why the dude was in a chair? It’s not like it had ANY BEARING at ALL on our class. But ask they did, on the very first day of class. Thinking back on it, I guess he brought it upon himself when he finished going over the syllabus and asked the class if anyone had any questions.

I expected him to comment on how utterly rude the question was, but he didn’t. Like all people with a major physical difference he’d no doubt developed pretty thick skin about his condition. So, after we’d discussed the syllabus and the textbook we’d be using—our teacher told us the story of how he became a paraplegic.

Apparently he went swimming at a lake and dove head-first into water that was a bit too shallow. He broke his neck and severed his spine. I can still see his eyes shinning as he told us the story. Here I was at my first day of class and I was watching a (disabled) person I didn’t even know fight back tears.

This children, is the very definition of awkward.

Now, if I suddenly became disabled, I’d be one unhappy person. But this guy, my Geography teacher, wasn’t like that at all. He was very upbeat, almost to the point of nausea. A product of the 1960’s counter-culture, this guy had a philosophy towards life that frankly, shocked the hell out of me.



See, I don’t still remember this guy because he broke his neck and taught class sitting down—no, this guy is forever seared into my brain because he was bat-shit crazy. About a week into the class, he just stopped mid-lecture and looked at us (most of us were asleep) and started telling us all to drop-out.

Not just out of his class mind you, but college in general.

“If I was your age, I’d just pack a bag and go explore the world,” he said. “Believe me, we’ll be here waiting for you when you come back.”

By “we’ll be here” he meant school/college. Now that I’m a little older and more settled (read: fucking trapped in my life) I realize that this was actually good advice. But at the time I was just trying to get my Associate’s Degree so I could move out of my parent’s basement. I didn’t want to drop out of school. I didn’t want to back-pack across Europe (isn’t that how one falls prey to werewolf attacks?).

This advice, though sound, was actually a pretty stupid thing for him to say. After all, didn’t his job depend on us being there? And yet he stood (sat) there and was telling us all to ditch school in favor of adventure and excitement. Maps, he liked to remind us, were created by people who’d actually BEEN there. But why should we just take there word for it? Though he never said he had a “motto” per say, I think that if he had one it would be simply “GO.”

I can dig this sentiment of “see if yourself,” because of an odd quirk of mine. You see, I suffer from what I can only describe as severe case of skepticism/narcissism.

I only really believe in the things that are immediately around me.

Every since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated by time and space NOT involving myself. For example, the class room where I can Geography still exists. This room may look a little different than the way I remember it, but for the most part it’s the same room. Right now at this second, as I write this.

And yet I am not at this room.

New York. Tokyo. London. These places all exist despite the fact that I’m not there (probably will NEVER be there). Beyond that, these cities exist AND are full of people. People who have no idea that I even exist. People who run along on their own merry little way, with their own merry little problems and triumphs.

I understand that I am not the center of the Universe. There is (or so I’m told) an infinite amount of space stretching in all directions, and it existed before I was born and will continue to do so long after I am dead.

And yet, a large part of me denies this because, how can that be?

Sitting in Geography class you can see Tokyo, Japan on a map. You can see pictures and video, but unless you actually GO there—how can one truly know that Tokyo exists? I think that there is a true version of this world/universe, but I don’t think it’s possible to experience it. Everyone experiences the world a little differently.

Just like no two witnesses tell the exact same story, I think there are probably 9 billion interpretations of Earth and the things on it. That’s kinda what my Geography teacher was saying, I think. People should get out and see the world, instead of taking it for granted that it’s there.