escritoireazul

Sometimes I'm around to see something and want to talk about it. Today is that day.

questionoftheday: What is your aesthetic?

Apparently, it is red. Awhile back, I moved into a new office and started putting out various things. A couple weeks in, one of my coworkers came in with some questions and made an off-hand comment about how much I must love the color red.

Me: I ... actually don't like the color red.

But I was wearing a red shirt, and there are red decorations on one of my shelves (little carved owls from a project I did last year with a designer), and the box with my business cards is floral and bright red (pretty enough that I leave it out instead of in a drawer), and a bunch of the reference books I have are red (they were all gifts) and ...

I don't like red. I don't hate it, but I've never much liked it. It's an angry color, and I'm angry enough on my own. My favorite color is blue, particularly teals and midnight blues, and when I wear them, I am more settled and in control.

I am angry all the time, and apparently, over the past five years, have been filling my wardrobe with red to reflect that. I am angry, and I am smart, and I am sharp, and at work, I do not need to be softer or gentler or kinder or settled. I can rage and still be in control.

My mom's favorite color was red. She was gentle (and sometimes painfully meek, though she'd brought herself out of that for the most part by the time I was growing up) and kind and good. I think, though, that a part of her was also always angry. The part she used to teach me that I could do anything and be anything, that I could be big and loud and angry and smart, that I could intimidate people just by existing and that was okay. Mom struggled a lot with how to deal with a bunch of queer kids, and non-Christian kids, and liberal kids, but she loved us and pushed us and supported us.

Mom's birthday would have been this Saturday and the anniversary of her death next Friday. I'll wear red.

Aesthetic in summary: jeans, casual dresses (eshakti all the way), reds and oranges for work, blues and blacks at home, leggings and knock-off Chucks under dresses and cotton and jean skirts, wrestling t-shirts and old, torn up jeans for studio time (at home or at the pottery studio), bright red lips and usually no other make-up, wildly curly hair.