Pink is a yes color

When I was in the 9th grade, we read John Knowles' novel, A Separate Peace, in English class.

A Separate Peace is one of those mysterious books that some people never encountered over the course of their education, while others (myself included), found it assigned to them on three separate occasions (See also: The Prince, Beowulf and Canterbury Tales).

For those of you who didn't have to read (or pretend to read, by the third time around) A Separate Peace, I'll spoil this one little bit for you: There's a character named Phineaus.

Thankfully, he's known as Finny. Finny is the coolest kid in school. He is friends with the narrator, Gene, who is basically the not-quite-popular kid in the popular clique at your high school.

Anyway, there's an episode in the book where Gene finds himself in Finny's room and, naturally, decides to try on Finny's clothes. This is, obviously, a way of "showing" (rather than "telling") the reader that Gene wishes he could be more like Finny. It is also creepy and weird.

My 9th grade English teacher, perhaps afraid that we had somehow missed the metaphor, strove to find some detail of the story that would help us comprehend the fact that Gene wanted to be Finny, and why that was, and how we could tell because he was putting on Finny's clothes.

And thus, the phrase, "Pink is a yes color" entered my lexicon.

You see, Finny wears a pink shirt. A bold, though generally unremarkable thing in 2009, this was perhaps more of a big deal to sixteen year old boys in the 1940s. Though obviously I can't say for certain.

My teacher attempted to instill all of the qualities that made Finny's character "popular" into the color of this one shirt and then pronounced, as if it were a common fact, "Obviously, Knowles picked pink because it is a yes color".

When we blinked at her in confusion, she informed us that when you wear pink, people give you what you want. For this reason, she encourages her husband to wear pink shirts when he has important business meetings. He is always successful because pink is a yes color.

The idea of using your appearance to get things from people is not an entirely foreign concept to teenagers. But we were still not convinced about this whole pink business.

As a means to prove her point, she gave our entire class (indeed, all of her classes) an extra credit "assignment": Everyone who wore a pink shirt to class on a given day would be given 100 extra-credit points.

The logic behind all of this continues to escape me, and I don't recall anything particularly good happening to me on that day, aside from the extra-credit I'd already been promised.

On the other hand, it's been ten years now and every time I put on a pink shirt, I think, "Pink is a yes color".

Then I spend the rest of the day thinking about how if pink really were a "yes color" then things would probably be going differently.

Today though, my cynicism about the power of colors was checked.

Yesterday, I had the most Monday of Mondays. My computer decided to throw a party and invite a whole host of viruses and spyware to come over and play in every corner of my hard-drive.

After an exasperating day of restarts, safe modes and virus scans, I handed my computer over to the amazing Rob S. who had generously offered to take a look at all of the new friends I'd managed to acquire. Neither of us wanted to bet on the odds that I wouldn't need to reformat my hard drive before the saga was over.

But today was a new day. Today, I wore a pink sweater.

The power of pink, and Rob's mad skills, came through in a big way and my computer was up and running, virus free, by this afternoon.

I was so happy I hugged it. I didn't hug Rob, but I am going to buy him a beer.