...or whatever they're calling it now.
I am a grown person. I have a bank account, checkbook, credit card, all that crap. I own a car. I pay my taxes. (I don't help my landlady with her garbage.) My personal weakness is writing instruments: pens, markers, gel pens, glitter pens, metallic inks, rich jeweltoned pigments with or without embellishment. Adults are quite able to buy pens — even colored pens — and no one thinks a thing of it. But just let an adult step up to the register with a box of crayons and people will wonder which child will be receiving them, and what for (birthday? completing their chores? eating their vegetables? an improved report card? what?)
Damn you, people, those are MY crayons!!!
I've always loved coloring. I'm not talking your standard children's coloring books, with houses and kids playing and toy balls and twee pet animals. No. The more simplistic, the less interested I was. When I was about 7, an aunt and uncle gave me Altair Designs and a set of markers for my birthday, and I was over the moon. Altair Designs weren't merely intricate, they were abstract - utterly abstract, geometric designs. Sure, I could have 'found' regular figures like monkeys and trees and so forth. I preferred to pick out other patterns. I'd spend hours meditating on what patterns to bring to the fore, what colors to use, how to elaborate on the design I'd started the previous day. A few years later I received some other coloring books — now utterly lost to history, I don't even remember the titles — with fanciful designs of alien landscapes, Escheresque patterns of stylized dragonflies or overlapping octopods, and utterly odd, off-the-wall drawings that, when colored, would either send psychoanalysts into fits of fearful twitching or given a psychology student a fairly good dissertation topic.
Coloring remains my favorite meditation-relaxation technique. It lets me be still; it keeps me thinking; it engages enough of my imagination-brain to keep me from being bored but not enough to make me feel distracted, overwhelmed, or busy; it lets me work through whatever issues I have lingering in my subconscious; and sometimes I come up with extremely cool things. I prefer markers (Pentel, set of 36) because of the smooth delivery and even distribution of pigments...but some times, crayons are the best tools to use. I own several boxes: one of 120, and two of 96. I managed to get some sets before Crayola went on the renaming binges of the 1990s, so I actually own crayons with the following names (now of hallowed memory):
- burnt sienna
- raw umber
- brick red (okay, I give up...why'd they change this color's name?!??)
- blue grey
- mulberry
- thistle
- violet blue
I think that some of the 'new color names' are just too faddish, abstracted, or twee. Mauvelous? Razzmatazz? They sound like rejected nicknames for Mouseketeers. Is 'tumbleweed' a dry, dead tannish, or slightly yellow-white? Tickle Me Pink? That one's straight out of Crayolas: the Porno Edition. These color names do not belong in any box I will ever own. They are Plain D. Wrong.
I tend to color while sitting in my living room, the paper on my lap desk and the markers beside me. I'll sometimes go outside, though, if there's a park close by. Once I tried coloring at a coffee shop, but got too many odd stares from other adults on their way to work (and one slightly jealous glance from a girl of 10 or 11 who, apparently, didn't read the subclause stating that coloring is never, ever not cool.) If you ever spot me sitting and coloring, feel free to pull up a chair and join me. It's a great way to relax, I don't criticize anyone's coloring technique or chosen medium, and there's no lines or traffic.
Just don't break any of my crayons.
