A Blueberry Nightmare

You are in a place that seems, somehow, to be wrong. Liquid clocks ooze down tree branches filled with the cosmos. A chandelier hangs, upside-down, suspended from a table with no legs. A waterfall pours from the horizon, yet no cliffs exist. The lonely grass under your feet stutters as it recites the quadratic formula through a thick, syrupy French accent. Casually, pencil sharpeners seem to drift by in the breeze--only, there isn't one.

You are in a very special place, a place devoid of sanity. Not only are the laws of physics grotesquely distorted; so are the laws of color. In the green river to your left, mauve blueberries frolic with joyful abandon. The grass, now thoroughly confused with the impossibility of a negative number possessing a square root, is an obnoxious shade of purple. And the pencil sharpeners have no color whatsoever, yet they remain visible. There is no other place anywhere in any universe or any dimension that operates under such an eye-scarring color scheme. Except for one other, one found in the least likely place.

Gingerly, open your eyes. Walk out into the hallway (so what if it's the middle of class?). Observe the metaphysical colors around you, and pay special attention to the lockers; you are presently in that other place. The plain looking bricks comprise the backdrop for lockers with colors like no other: blueberry, mauve and sea foam. No joke, folks, that diluted green hue is called "sea foam." Talk about weird.

Walking down the hallways feels like wandering inside an aging television with the color balance in dire need of adjustment. You don't have to be an art major to notice the lack of primary colors in the hallways. I mean, how hard could it be to choose some remotely normal colors to adorn the walls? Would that make too much sense? Perhaps the color scheme was designed by the same people who planned the intersection of Valley View and 66th over by the pool; I don't know.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm all for brightening up a school that has virtually no windows (whose idea was that, anyway?), and I think painting the lockers is a good way to help relieve the feeling of being in some sort of satanic dungeon two kajillion feet underground. But "sea foam"?

My personal opinion is that the lockers are in serious need of repainting. Green and white would obviously be the initial colors of choice, but there's no guarantee for much of an improvement. Maybe primary colors would work better; those of you planning to be interior designers can work things out. I think things would be livened up sufficiently if a large mural were painted on the immense curvy wall by the cafeteria.

There's been a lot of controversy over the benefits of the remodeling. We will probably never reach a consensus on whether it was worth the cost or not. There are definite advantages to the renovated building; but the technicolor lockers contribute to the illusion of an unbalanced, surreal universe halfway between Salvador Dali and the Brady Bunch.

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