"Red"

I like red.  It's warm and fiery and comfortable.  It's cherries and berries and wine.  It's roses and hearts on Valentine's Day and poinsettias at Christmas and cardinals in the snow.  Some people really dislike red though.  Maybe because it's also the color of blood?  As someone told me, there's no good reason for a man to see blood.  I found that interesting.  Women see blood every month.  They may not like it, but it's natural.

Okay, I've seen my blood a lot more than that because some of my risk taking didn't turn out that well.  Maybe this is a family trait?  One time I took a brother to the hospital and found my nephew just outside the hospital door with his hand up in the air and blood running down his arm.  Brother and nephew were put in opposite ER rooms and I varied my time between the two of them.

When I came into my nephew's room I found him studying the red, bloodied sheets on his bed.  He said "Doesn't it look like poppies?" and I thought "Yeah, he's from my gene pool" while I laughed with him.  I went to my brother's room and listened to the doctor describe how he was going to trim some of the fat oozing from the wound so that the cut would heal up neater.  My brother joked about how he was getting "liposuction". Definitely something different in my gene pool.

Neither of these guys were too seriously hurt.  They both got stitched up, I gave a safety lecture, and as far as I know neither of them are having flashbacks about that day.*

I don't get too fussed about my own blood.  I'm liable to study my own Rorschach blood spots and see poppies too.  I've watched doctors stitch me up and studied their methods, but I don't like to see other people who are hurt.  I'd rather be hurt myself than to see someone else suffering.  If I'm hurt, then I'm in control of the pain.  If someone else hurts, then all I can do is bleed emotionally with them.

Sometimes I wonder what other people feel because other people don't think I feel things "right".  Some people have said so at any rate, and that's been true throughout my life, but I can't imagine feeling less.  It's kind of like imagining yourself with less intelligence or too many fingers or something.  What I've mostly learned from those kinds of comments is that it's best to keep my feelings to myself because even if my feelings are "normal", other people don't want to be bothered with them.

I watched a woman on a talk show once.  The people on the show figured she must be lying about the trauma she had suffered because she didn't flick an eyelash in pain.  I figured she was telling the truth because it takes a lot of misery to learn that much self control.  A liar knows they're supposed to be crying and puts on a show to get sympathy.  I think about that woman on the talk show sometimes and hope she's learned some happiness, found some poppies in the blood splotches.

The pattern is just fun for fun and playing in Illustrator.  It's not my favorite program, so I thought I'd play with it a bit to brush up on my skills.

*Correction: I read this post to my brother.  When I said he wasn't having flashbacks from his injury, he looked at his hand and said "it still hurts sometimes".  Correction posted on his request :)