Say Maybe to the Dress
What colour is this dress? WHAT COLOUR IS IT?!/ Rikard Elofsson
Black and blue or white and yellow, it’s just a dress so go be mellow.
Author: Jamie Orr
Last week, I was in the rainbow wonderland of San Francisco when I heard about the Internet fiasco. Naturally, I had my phone on airplane mode the whole day to prevent the roaming costs that financially equates Canadian tourists to that Alberta woman who gave birth in Hawaii. Checking Reddit might have enabled my addiction, but at what cost? Literally, though. It’s never truly clear. I digress. That night, I came back to my overly accepting Bed and Breakfast’s Wi-Fi to discover that everyone in the world was colourblind and mad about it. Leave it to Tumblr to disturb the peace of a slow news day.
Thank God, too — the Internet has been lacking something to overreact to for weeks. The most I’ve seen is a video about skeletons kissing and every comment reads something along the lines of ‘Thanks for the post, Karen! Love truly is louder!’ and agreeing with each other like barbarians. That’s not why I keep you subscribed on my news feed. I was seriously considering responding to the friend request of my mom’s ‘not racist, just concerned’ cousin if that kind of plebeian behaviour kept up. Thankfully, that dress revived my faith.
Here’s the issue about the whole thing: there is none. The long sustained stoner question of ‘Man, do you ever wonder if the green I see is the green I see?’ had been answered long ago by know-it-all scientists who stated that yes, in fact, the curious were maybe a little too high for the experiment. In terms of actual science, though, the answer was no. We all are special little snowflakes with different rods and cones in our eyeballs that use magnets (???) to see images; I’m paraphrasing. So the fact that many people see the dress as different colours is not a new thing. Even BuzzFeed could tell you that.
The beautiful aspect about it is how Internet commentators could not even about the fact that their version of the truth was different from that of someone else. Former Team White and Gold members changed their minds when Taylor Swift announced that it was, in fact, black and blue. That self-diagnosed smart friend on your Twitter page pulled the jealous-but-not-jealous-ex-boyfriend technique by their incessant need to tweet ‘who cares, u dummies.’ BuzzFeed lists of only things Team Black and Blue members would understand were made one by one. The most beautiful of them all, however, has to be the meaningless swarm of anti-racist rants, urging people to not see things just by colour. Thank you @bieberisstillagoodguy21, you really are the new Martin Luther King Jr.
For now, I will enjoy the Throwback Thursday posts and the overdone memes about the dress. Personally, I say white and gold. My friend says I’m an idiot. My dad says he doesn’t know how to open the attachment. Naturally, as an Arts student who took the prestigious Science 10, I’m accepting of all answers. But in more obvious terms, if you think of black and blue as something other than a fantastic Backstreet Boys album, you are a stupid, self-righteous pig who is forever dead to me.
What? Isn’t that how the Internet works?
[…] know this may seem out of place for someone who is described as “humour girl” in this newspaper, but I assure you this is not the case. I am not, in fact, a shitty superhero […]