Yesterday I was submitting a comment to a local magazine I hope to write a piece for someday. And not just someday, the entire comment was comprised of me asking them if they'd be interested in an opinion piece about discovering the city from a new perspective (the perspective of having grown up there and then coming back for holidays). So basically, I was selling myself. Well, my so-called talent, I should say. That sounds less cheap.
At the bottom of the comment box, there was another, littler box that said "what is the color of snow?". My first instinct was that it was just a verification tool, meant to keep the web-bots and cyborgs out of the comments. But then I flipped out. What if it's a test?
So I racked my head for the perfect answer to show them that I was an out-of-the-box thinker, that the lightbulbs went off so crazy-fast in my head that I was likely to give myself epilepsy.
I finally found my perfect comment: Is it a color? I thought it was a feeling. A Paris feeling. I've never been there, but I know it's great and that I'll discover it myself one day. And every time will be like the first time.
Okay, so a little cheesy. But it felt like me, you know? I thought it said a lot about who I was as a writer, the kind of things I thought about, the overall whimsical (and slightly naive) nature of my brain functions.
What did it turn out to be? A verification tool. Once I submitted, red writing popped up all over the page asking me to verify my answer and a new question had been added, "solve 10-5".
Thankfully, I'd given up at this point and didn't try to describe the color (or feeling) of 5. Even those of us on the more ignorant side of life know when to throw in the abacus.