100 Ruminations on the Color Yellow

Day 22 of 100 Days Ruminating on the Color Yellow

Confirmation bias is at work here: I googled “yellow light anxiety study” and, what do you know, a study proving that yellow light causes anxiety from 1975!

#100DaysOfYellow #AmWrit

Day 21 of 100 Days Ruminating on the Color Yellow

Last October, there was a trend on TikTok where creators introduced subjects as “my yellow” to indicate that they love them. SOs, but also friends, pets, and siblings. It’s in refer

Days 14–20 of 100 Days Ruminating on the Color Yellow

14 - Pantone selected “Ultimate Gray” and “Yellow Illuminating” as the Color of the Year for 2021. Still reeling from the attack on the U.S. Capital and days away fr

Day 13 of 100 Days Ruminating on the Color Yellow

It felt silly to write about yellow today, when the whole neighborhood seemed to be chanting blue! blue! blue! Hope you got some sun today, Seattle. Swipe for some good blues. Not pictured: A run in

Day 12 of 100 Days Ruminating on the Color Yellow

Really stuck on the inherent anxiety, the high-frequency vibrations of yellow (note to self: check out the science on that re: cones and rods in your eye — one of the many psych lectures that p

Day 11 of 100 Days Ruminating on the Color Yellow

Tbh the whole 100 day project could have been “uses for mustard.” At first I thought just pretzels and sandwiches, defining sandwiches rather broadly to include hot dogs, but once you sta

This year, I will be participating in the #100DayProject. Inspired by Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Kaye Blegvad’s The Pink Book, I am going to write 100 entries researching, reflecting, and ruminating on one color: yellow.

This project will live on Instagram. Each post will include a piece of this yellow quilt I’ve long been neglecting and a short bit of writing about the color yellow. Poems, lists, quotations — I’m giving myself a wide range of possibilities for the words part.

I like yellows. I like mustards and chartreuses. I like yellow foods like eggs and cheddar cheese. I like that one Coldplay song, and “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Yellow Submarine”. Because of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” yellow feels bound up in anxiety and womanhood and being stuck at home, but because of the cartoonish way we depict the sun, it also feels sunny, joyful, and bright.

Yellow is also associated with warning signs and danger. Yellow is central to the language of anti-Asian prejudice and racism, something that I’m overdue to deepen my understanding of. “Yellow journalism” is a term I know I understood enough for the AP US History exam, but couldn’t tell you about right now.

So yellow feels like a rich prompt for both reflection and research. Wish me luck and follow along at #100RuminationsOnTheColorYellow.