Image

Why pink?

This is easy.  White is harsh to look at on screen, not good for dyslexics and other people with a cognitive disability, and wearing on my own eye.  Pink is warm and easy on the eye.  Blue is pleasant but can be a downer, and in any event I use blue for my technical blog Works First Time, and a lot of tech things in my life.  Green is in reserve.  There are other pastel colours, point is; projected white is pure, but bad in design terms.  I had written this at the end of the rant below, but I thought it was the easy question, so here it is, up front.

Why everything else?

I get more questions about image than anything else in my life.  I used to regard image, and  mean image as we present ourselves to the world as unimportant, but I’ve now changed my view, (I do that from time to time), as one of the most important things we do.

Partly because, as a man, I have observed, and experienced, that the acceptable range of images to project is limited.  For a long time I ignored it altogether.  I wore skirts, and didn’t persue any kind of career.  I opted out of just about everything.  I could do this because I was married and spent a great deal of time taking care of my kids.  I have two boys.  They don’t things I do, but they don’t conform either, and yet they somehow manage to be insystem in ways that I’m not.

I’m a great big bloke, and I try not to be ashamed of it, but when it comes to image, it doesn’t help.  I don’t enjoy it; this is different to saying I don’t like it, I have always been happy about the strength that has come with it, but not the backache or the occasional attacks from feminists that happened in my early twenties, for simply being a man.  I felt I had to apologise for it.  I can’t help it, as much as I try.  No-one knows what it is to be a man anymore.

So why pink, and why blonde for what is after all a personal blog?

Because people react better to women, it makes them feel better, less threatened; (have you seen my normal grumpy face?  I look like John Prescott on dope.  People feel threatened just looking at me. No-0ne wants a random Prescott.  Actually most of the time I’m just happy and thinking); because it’s the way to get attention on the web, all those little ads have some gorgeous young thing on them when the tech support line YOU are about to call will be staffed by someone like me, yeah, think about that; and because, in this particular case, if there was a magic wand and there was a face I could present to the world, this would be it.  Sad isn’t it.

I’m divorced now, and I find that no-one understands, not even intellectuals, why I wear skirts, and yet manage to project my huge aura of manliness around it, as well as confidence, (faked), the air of pure righteousness, (faked), and power to command a room, (faked).

I, in turn, will never understand why the young women, remember I just finished a degree so I have been mixing with younger people, find it such an attractive element in me.  Maybe it’s something to do with confidence, which as you will recall from the paragraph above, is faked.