the whole red=hot, blue=cold thing. Doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I grew up with a gas stove and the flame was blue, so that's why I associate blue with heat, red is just calming, but white now that represents cold. Snows white, and most ice is white(or some part of it). Where'd they come up with blue for cold, makes no sense whatsoever.


Anyone agree with me?
btw I wasn't drunk or stoned when I came up with this either.

Well, don't hurt anything :D (kidding if you couldn't tell by the smiley; now the chances are if I tried to think on the other hand).

Your logic makes sense, but I guess they came up with all that back in the day before they had gas stoves. I read something interesting in the paper the other day on color meanings too.

Right now for babies and little kids pink=girl, blue=boy. On one hand it's seemed ridiculous to me that we have to color code our children, but, as the author of the article was pointing out, it does come in handy when you're dealing with a small bald person since it can be difficult to guess the gender in those cases without some kind of cue.

To digress, I know the pitfalls inherent in that as I once went up to someone I'd had a class with and sort of been friends with in university whom I hadn't seen in several months who was holding a baby, obviously hers. I guess she must have been pregnant when we had the class together but she wasn't showing. Anyway, I felt I should say something and decided to come up with something more witty than "Wow, I didn't know you were pregnant". The baby was in that sort of bald, amorphous phase and was dressed in red. Red to me is gender neutral, so I looked for a second made up my mind and said, "Wow, he's really cute". She said, "Thanks, but he's a she", sputtered something or another and feel mortified to this day.

Anyway, the baby girls wear pink/baby boys wear blue thing used to apparently be the opposite. Pink was considered sort of a sub color of red which was considered a fierce, agressive, manly kind of color (it could be I just think it's gender neutral because it's my original favorite color) whereas blue was considered more gentle and tranquil so it was associated with girls and pink was associated with boys.

The temperature thing leads to a misheard song lyric which I like better the way I thought it was. There's a line in the song "Arms of the Angel" (I think it might be by Sarah Maclaughlin, but don't quote me on that) that really is "in this dark, cold hotel room". For the longest time I thought it was "in this star-cooled hotel room". This made perfect sense to me as obviously the sun is hot light and the stars and moon are cold light (okay I guess that's just in my bizarre little world :P ). The thing is I like it with the star-cooled bit better. It's just more poetic and this darn poetic lisence they keep talking about, along with my BA in English must be good for something, right?

And strange thoughts are not the exclusive territory of drunk/stonedness, though I hear it don't hurt, me I'm odd enough sober. I've often wondered why is it fat chance, when obviously it's a rather thin chance. This is why I have so much fun with the Oxford English dictionary (bet you thought you'd never hear those two in the same sentence, right). I'm trying to think of more expressions that puzzle me, but I can't.

yea babies look all the same to me so i just call them it. When I was two i had the thinnest finest hair and it wouldn't grow long and i looked like a boy and my mom would dress me in the girliest clothes and people would call me a boy. Maybe that 's why I spent my childhood convinced I was born a boy and my parents got me a sex change cuz they already had a boy so why would they need another one.

you try to discuss this things with certain people they get all huffy and act like red=hot, blue=cold is some divine truth.

the weird thing is if i want to shut my mind off I just go get stoned and I noticed the way alot of my friends think stone I think sober and i think like them when they're sober stoned.

My female cousin, who is about four years older than I am, had the same problem as a child. For a really long time she was just plain bald, then when her hair started to grow in it was really fine and blond so she was about three before it looked as if she had any hair at all. This was this aunt and uncles first child and, of course, first daughter so I imagine my aunt was looking forward to having a girly girl to dress up. She could put dresses on her of course, but there was nothing to be done about her hair. Then to add insult to injury I come along. I was born with a lot of really dark hair and then my adult hair, for the lack of a better word,--lighter but still obviously there-- grew in with equal abundance almost immediately after my baby hair fell out/rubbed off.

So here's my poor aunt with her bald toddler, which forced her mother to make her wear hats all the time, and her baby cousin who has scads of hair with bows and pigtails and all that.

Of course this cousin turned out to be quite well-behaved, until she got to be an older teenager at least. and I turned out to be shall we say challenging, although I was a pretty tame teenager all in all. This cousins was also endlessly obsessed with me and picking me up. I swear I have actual memories of being in my grandparents' yard being held with a death grip around the middle, feeling somewhat unhappy with the situation while my aunt called out "Put her down she doesn't like it". I'd say it's just the age that they discover there are other people in the world especially babies younger than they are, but she had a brother who's not that much younger than I am so why I was so fascinating I can't imagine when she had her little bro. to torment 24/7 practically.

It's funny too what you think when you're little. I was pretty certain I belonged to my parents but had some pretty wild ideas about exactly where babies came from, which I won't share (mostly because I only remember bits and piece, but those bits are quite odd, I assure you). My mother on the other hand remained convinced that she was adopted and she'd keep saying to her parents "No, really, I'm adopted aren't I? You can tell me". She did have a cousin who was adopted who was about her age, but even she's not sure where the absolute conviction that she was adopted came from. It even stayed with her. A few years ago one of my great aunts called her and said she wanted to tell her something she though my mom ought to know. It turned out to be a family story that she already knew about from a different source, but still as an adult and a mother herself, she was still sure for a split second that her aunt was going to tell her she was in fact adopted.

On that some subject my mom got some wierd looks after I was born because for some reason she was one of these people who hardly shows at all. My dad's sister happened to work at the same company my mom did, and they didn't know each other until she started dating my dad, and one person who knew them both came up to her asked her if she was sure my mom was really pregnant. Then after I was born about the first Sunday that my parents started taking me out in public a neighbor who happened to have several adopted children herself came up to my mom, saw me commented that I was very cute (can't say I'm sure what happened since then) and then asked her where she got me--thinking I guess that I was adopted-- and my mother didn't immediately grasp this and asked her "What do you mean?"

I was never bald I was born with a full head of hair. Well I was bald when I 6 or 7 months then it grew back thinner. The crazy thing my parents tried to convince me that I wasn't born a boy, but I didn't believe them, of course I didn't bring it up often. I'm sure alot of beliefs were from things my brother tell me. I always believed him over my mom eventhough alot of the things were just plain mean. I remember going through a stage where I'd like every thing he liked then going through one where I hated every thing he liked. I'm the youngest and remember always asking my mom to have another girl so I could have it all an older sibling and a younger sibling, but it was always just me and my brother. I thought it was my fault that my mom didn't want anymore kids cuz I just wasn't right.

Hmm, interesting. When you mentioned your brother convincing you of all sorts of odd ideas it reminds me of something an acquaintance of mine told me. She and her sister actually convinced their younger brother he was born without a bum and they had to take a transplant off some fat kid's rear end to build him one. This led to them witnessing the following scene as they walked past his room one night: the little brother was standing in front of his mirror with his pants down looking over his shoulder repeating to himself "I do so have a bum, I do so have a bum" over and over again.

The other funny thing is my mom and her older brother used to get their younger brother trapped on top of one of the beds and then tell him there was a monster under there. If he put his foot down it would eat it (ditto any other body part) and if he yelled for their mom. then the monster would come out and eat him anyway. So the poor child would be sitting up there quaking in terror trying to figure out if he dared chance it to hop down and make a run for it, or to yell for help. He did once bean them with his bottle though in that situation. The funny thing is he is now, of course an adult, who is about 6'4" (sorry don't know exactly what that is in meters maybe around 2 meters or so, plus a bit more) and he remembers the experience. It's so funny to see this very tall, dignified man retelling/acting out this story of his former torment.

I don't have brothers, so no brother stories of my own (though I do recall standing on my grandparents' porch with some male cousins who were trying to convince me the aliens were coming for me; I was mostly skeptical, but boy were they trying), but I have to say vicarious experiencing the joy of brothers through various friends' brothers, I was quite happy with that situation. Now I wish I had some though.

I remember when I was about 7 or 8 possibly young as 6 taking our Boat down the Mississippi to the Helena Blues festival, it was night my dad was at the festival listing to music and my mom and brother were in the beberth telling ghost stories. My brother tells the one about a fish the bites of butts of people who go to bathroom on boats, my mom doesn't say anything really or if she does its too egg him on. I decide that I have to pee so being a girl I have to sit but I'm scared to so I go to the toilet my mom makes some comment about how she hopes nothing comes up through the toilet, and bite my bottom,I scream and jump, and they laugh.

This isn't the only time my mom scared us. I remember hearing years later about the time my mom told my brother, who was four at the time, about the sand man and him being terrified to go to sleep, because he didn't want sand in his eyes. He blames that on the reason why he's never liked the beach.