Spectrum

I am endlessly fascinated by light and colors; I have been since I was young.

When I was really little, my mom used to sing me this song:
            You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
            You make me happy when skies are gray
            You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
            Please don’t take my sunshine away

From what I remember, the reason why skies are gray on cloudy days (when they are normally blue) is because the sunlight is being reflected as it goes through the clouds. The same is true with fog and mist. Incidentally, if you have a really bright day even when it is cloudy or foggy, you get a worse sunburn if you stay outside than you would on a normal day. Kind of like a magnifying glass. At least that’s how I remember my parents explaining it to me.

Back when I used to be Pentecostal, I wore a lot of clothing with Christian messages on it. My favorite shirt was a glow-in-the-dark shirt that, on the front, said “Be the Moon.” The back had an image of a cross that read “Reflect the Son.” I don’t wear this shirt anymore, but I still love it because it is an amazingly well crafted pun. I love it even more because it reminds me that the moon is lit at night because it is reflecting the sun.

Because light travels at a speed, the stars that we at night are what the stars looked like years ago (it’s either decades, centuries, or millenniums. I’m sure you can find it on Google and I’m trying to recite these things as I remember them). It’s kind of cool really, you’re basically looking into the distant past whenever you look at the night sky.

When I was growing up, my ceiling was painted blue and had stars and moons all across it. I had glow-in-the-dark star wallpaper and model spaceships that were hanging down from the ceiling. I regret that, as a teenager, I asked my parents to paint over it and replaced my glow-in-the-dark wallpaper with flames wallpaper. I’m often tempted to buy a star projector for my room so I can recreate the feeling I had when I was a kid in my space room whenever I go to sleep, since I cannot have stars naturally in a city.

Have you ever seen a factory at night? During the day, it’s a beige eyesore. At night (especially on rainy nights), it is a shining temple of silver and bronze that looks like it is creating clouds. Looks kind of like this:

Did you know that different colors create different moods in people, especially if they are exposed to a lot of it? For example, if you are put into a room that has orange or yellow colored walls, you grow annoyed and angry easily. Blue and pink produce calming effects in people, some sport teams try to hinder a visiting team’s aggression by painting the visiting locker room pink or blue. Green is a color that brings about healing, some hospitals take advantage of this by having rooms with green walls.

A lot of times, different colors are meant to symbolize different aspects of natures or of people’s emotions. In Captain Planet, the green wing was for earth, red for fire, light blue for wind, blue for water, and yellow for heart. In Power Rangers Mystic Force, the Red ranger was fire, light blue was water, pink was wind, yellow was lightening, green was nature, and white was snow. In a video game called Legend of Dragoon (one of my favorites when I was 10), red was fire, blue was water, white was light, black was darkness, earth was bronze, wind was green, and lightning was purple. I find it amazing that (with the exception of fire and water), nature would always be represented by different colors; it couldn’t be limited to one. Wind can be seen as pink, green, and light blue. Nature is green or bronze. Even lightning is either yellow or purple.

In the comic world, most people know the Green Lantern, but there are 9 different types of rings. Red for rage, Orange for Avarice, Yellow for Fear, Green for Willpower, Blue for Hope, Violet for Love, Indigo for Compassion, White for Life, and Black for Death. From what my brother tells me about this (he knows more about the different rings than I do), blue/hope is the lamest.

One of my favorite Magic School Bus books was the one where Ms. Frizzle had a pinball machine in her classroom where the “ball” was white light that was shot into a prism and the divided into the seven colors of the rainbow, because white light contains all the colors. I never forgot this little fact and it, in 8^th grade, inspired me to do my Science Fair project on measuring the different wavelength on the different colors as they came out of a prism. My favorite part of having done this experiment is it gave me an excuse to have my parents buy me a prism.

I don’t really understand how light works, but I do know that our eyes can only pick up a certain wavelength and, therefore, limited colors. There are different wavelengths than just the ones that we see, I personally wonder if that means there are different colors that humans are not able to see but that other creatures might be enjoying.

In high school, my best friend often accused me of seeing things in terms of black and white, meaning that I was a dichotomist with a very simple and impractical take on morality. I’d often hear that “the world is not black and white, there are shades of gray.” To me, this black, white, and gray world sounds like a very boring one; I remember always having loved lights and colors. Maybe I did not see shades of gray when I was in high school, but why look at gray when I could be looking at something as vibrant as crimson, as therapeutic as a forest green, or as inspiring as a deep and royal purple?

A gray world is a drab world, I’d rather have the sunshine. Looking back, I think I’d tell my friend to stop being stupid by trying to take it away.