Wrathful pigmentation
Generally I like people, when they have a fully-functional conscience. Otherwise, they are merely amusing in a kind of pastel yellow way: ill and sallow.
Yesterday I had - not one, but two! - ill and sallow experiences.
I've never really liked the colour yellow, but as a colloquial adjective it rocks your grandmother's socks. The woman who picked up the mobile phone I accidentally dropped in the cab was yellow like the knock-kneed weed of a bullied youth, bleeding from his mouth and pride. The way she answered the phone with "No, sorry, wrong number" was yellow like diseased porridge. You corroded carbuncle, you have no self-respect to fill an ant's thimble. Go and excavate your humanity.
This all begs the question: what do you then call the person who dropped the phone in the cab in the first place?
Answer: a multicoloured, prodigious idiot. Multicoloured: suffering from chronic blues, red from embarrassment, and really quite greenly ill at the prospect of explaining it all to her aunt (who is the owner of said phone).
But anyway.
That story ends this morning, after I finally got through to her long enough to talk her conscience into a guilty splutter, and my aunt and I went to meet her to retrieve the phone, politely nodding at her cock-and-bull excuses. Observe:
"I accidentally picked up the phone while in the cab, and didn't realize it wasn't mine"
juxtaposed against
"Oh I've never had a Nokia phone before, so I didn't have the charger for it, so of course when you called it was out of battery"
juxtaposed against
you lying bitch, I was on full battery.
The italics are important.
In a cab on the way back to town, the driver (yellow like leprosy) took us on a route like Medusa's hair. Because I am in a sour mood, I made a scathing comment to my aunt about sly gutless drivers. I suppose I managed to ignite the feeble shreds of his conscience. He overchanged us without meeting my iron glare.
Some days I can be a bitch, and my rage translates well into flashing crimson. But I assure you, most days I'm really quite pink and sweet pastel.
(really).