In the pursuit of yellow

According to feng shui, yellow represents spiritual and intellectual activity while harnessing understanding.

In the book Colour for Life by Charles Philips, yellow is also associated with mental activity, with analytical thought and activities of the ego.

In the song song Yellow by Coldplay, Chris Martin crooned these lines to his beloved: Look at the stars / Look how they shine for you / And everything you do / Yeah, they were all yellow.

And of course let us not forget the Fabulous Four’s Yellow Submarine: So we sailed up to the sun / Till we found the sea of green / And we lived beneath the waves / In our yellow submarine.

So what are all these fuss about yellow?

Sometime last October, I embarked on this very short-term project that will ultimately be for the welfare of my own spirit. These past few months, I’ve felt that I easily get stressed - physically, mentally, emotionally. Work is usually the most convenient culprit, although other life complications have contributed to my escalating mental degradation. I’ve started to procrastinate heavily without any semblance of guilt or worry about the long list of harmful events and phenomena that will unfold as a consequence of my procrastination spree.

To make my whining short, I embarked on a creative activity that fueled my mind with passion and rabid enthusiasm – I decided to paint my room. The decision was not a difficult one. For me to really put my life back into good order, I must have a very warm space that would greet me at the very start of each brand new day.

But the enlightened idea of covering my drab, gray walls and ceiling was also peppered with conflicting opinions, most of which came from the interior decorating books that I’ve consulted and eventually befriended. Blue was my first choice because it’s my favorite, but then blue to me is just so… familiar. I thought of green for its calming and relaxing qualities, but I was scared that too much green might promote indolence and I cannot just wake up at 9 a.m. and report to work at past 10 a.m. (although I must admit that this has lately been my fashion statement).

And then I asked myself – how about yellow? I like the Beatles and Coldplay and they both have yellow songs, which were big hits, by the way. Of course, I engage in gazillion mentally stimulating activities inside my room like bring-home work, books, movies and online pornography (oops!) and yellow is said to have the capacity to fire up thoughts, banish drowsiness and foster attentiveness.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, yellow it is! Welcome to my nook.

Thank you so much to my beloved father who did all the painting by himself. Love you, Pop!

The ladies in the framed photo are my three best friends: Jean, my classmate since first year high school, a lawyer, married to her beautiful Ilana; Odyssa, my coffee buddy, a certified public accountant, eternal lover of anything feminine from flowered sandals to butterfly-emblazoned body-hugging blouses, a connosuier of more-than-friends-less-than-lovers life dramas; and Bibi - France and Germany are her playgrounds and she enjoys the best of both worlds (figure it out!).



The homoerotic image is a drawn by a very special friend, Jeffrey; the lampara is a gift from an officemate, my Manito; and the abstract piece is one of those beautiful rare bargains I got from a pre-Sinulog bazaar.






These are prints of Frida Kahlo (my third favorite artist right after Van Gogh and Joni Mitchell) self-portraits (also with her beloved Diego Rivera). The hideous aparador is actually an antique that my mother purchased from a dear neighbor who unfortunately went bankrupt (wihihihi!)