by Shilpa Saravanan, editor-in-chief

Orange: the color of my favorite sweatshirt, my bedspread, my towel, the sticky notes covering my desk, the fruits I eat with alarming frequency and the vegetables of which I ought to eat more. I’ve bought many a Penguin Classic because of the orange on the cover, and I’ve eaten many an artificially-flavored pumpkin something because of, well, orange.

Orange is a great color. It’s cheerful and spontaneous and fun and not so popular as to be irrelevant, but prevalent enough that it doesn’t have to go by a ridiculous Crayola name. (If you so choose it as your favorite color — as I encourage you to, if you haven’t got that figured out yet — be prepared to be the only one sticking up for it during awkward icebreaker games.) But it got out of hand after a fashion, as do all such almost-cute obsessions. Tellingly, when asked what my favorite thing in the entire world is, the first answer that springs to my lips is — orange. And my first thought after that: it’s evasive. Orange can’t be my favorite thing in the world. It’s not even a tangible thing, or an intangible one, for that matter. It’s a color. I’d never stopped to think about how little sense it made: can you actually determine your own likes and dislikes by something so simple as what color something is? Is it shallow, or is it twee & hip?

I mean, it does make your parents’ and friends’ jobs really easy when it comes to birthdays. And it makes your job easy, too: instead of looking into something properly, you can just like the orange one. (Or the purple one, or the periwinkle one. I don’t know, whatever floats your boat.) More often than not, though, it not just simplifies but oversimplifies the decision: I realized this summer that no, I really didn’t like the Dutch international soccer team as much as I thought I did, despite the ever-vibrant orange of their kits. I’ve never been particularly enamored of orange-flavored anything, and applying to only colleges whose colors are orange (this was the only-half-joking plan, at one point) couldn’t possibly get me anywhere.

But as I tried to mentally distance myself from orange — physical distance would have to come later, as it’s pervaded nearly everything I own — I found it as hard to think of good reasons for that as it was to think of good reasons for loving orange. There’s never a real justification for forcing that kind of change. That is to say: if you want to define yourself by your favorite color, it’s okay. Like what you like! LIVE YR LIFE