Color Blind

Ahh, the joys of color blindness.  It's a strange disorder.  

It's not like Herpes or the Flu, where when you have it, you just KNOW. People with color blindness usually don't discover there's even an issue until someone in their life decides that having a unanimous agreement on the color of an object is life's highest priority.

This brings us to the meat and taters of this week's topic: color blindness pet peeves!

Pet Peeve #1:  Color nazis. If I call something "blue" and it's actually teal or turqoise, cut me some slack. You're lucky I'm even on the correct side of the color wheel.  

Pet Peeve #2: Don't tell me women can't be color blind.  Yes, I've heard the same thing before; women are carriers of the gene, but they can't have color blindness.  That's a load of crap. While it's especially rare for women to be color blind, it's not unheard of and it's not always caused by genetics. And, last I checked, I had all my lady parts.  Whether they're pink or coral, I can't tell.

Pet Peeve #3: Asking for opinions on colors within the same family.  "Should I wear the olive green shoes or the forest green shoes?"  Green is green is green. Correction: I can see two shades of green; light green and dark green. 

Pet Peeve #4: Testing my color vision with random objects like it's a trivia game. Unless I'm exceedingly drunk, doing this will only anger me. I may get the color wrong, but at least naming colors incorrectly isn't as debilitating as being a complete idiot.

Pet Peeve #5: Assuming I can't see color at all. True black/white color blind people are almost non existent. When people point out basic colors to me like I don't know the difference, I always want to talk LOUD...AND...SLOW  as though they're a foreigner learning English...or just stupid. 

Pet Peeve #6: Color coding when there are more than just a few parts. My christmas tree is a color coded 200 piece puzzle of shame and anger. Nothing says "It's Christmas" quite like a glass of spiked eggnog and a rage induced aneurysm while putting the tree together.

Now, I'm not one for total pessimism so I will state that there are some slight advantages to being color blind. 

Advantage #1: "Wow, you're an artist and you're color blind??" Yes, I like hearing that.  It's like hearing, "Wow, you're quadriplegic and you slam dunked that basketball?"  Heck yeah, I AM that awesome.

Advantage #2: I don't have to waste my time with clothing.  There's no matching or color coordination going on in MY closet, no way.  ALL my pants go with ALL my T-shirts and anything that isn't in those two categories are basic colors.  None of that "teal," "coral," and "beige" nonsense. 

Advantage #3: Some colors are really ugly from my understanding. "Baby Puke Green" or "Baby Shit Brown" are inconceivable to me, really. I'm actually pretty glad I don't have the color accuity to be reminded of baby excrement upon viewing a specific color.

Sometimes, colorblindness can actually be pretty dangerous under certain cirumstances, as I will illustrate:

My car's battery died and it needed a jump.

The wires and felt markers around the terminals had faded and/or become really dirty, so the usual red/black color scheme had become something than can only be described as two "ish" colors.

I stared at the battery under my hood for what seemed like an eternity.

I decided that the positive was on top and the negative was on bottom, as was the geography in my mother's car.

Like a nurse giving a direct blood transfusion, I connected the two batteries and expected the life of my mom's battery to magically get sucked into my car's.

That didn't happen.

Instead, I saw smoke and smelled something I imagine being similar to what the Grim Reaper would squeak out of his bony butt after a night of gorging on Taco Bell.

The jumper cables had caught fire. I panicked.  No, really, I panicked.

After regaining some semblence of sanity, I grabbed the first thing I could think of to help me:  a mop.  I smacked at the wires with the mop until they broke free of the battery.  Disaster averted.

Since then, I have started doubting my color acuity even more.  I can still tell red from green in well lit areas, but from now on, if something will explode or cause death because of a mix up in colors, I stay the hell away from it.

Just for shits and giggles, I browsed around on the interwebs to find a good color acuity test that could actually show the process and the scoring...just so you know exactly what it is I'm talking about.

This was after I attempted to put the little tiles in order, colorlogically speaking.  And yes, my monitor is calibrated.

A perfect score is a ZERO.

I don't know how high the scale goes, but 99 is as far as it'll go for telling you how bad you suck.

If you care to take the test yourself, here's the website.