Human Traffic Lights -- Beware the Yellow

My workplace, which, through no fault of its own, is a corporate headquarters, is decorated with all manner of tasteful art. This is, by corporate lore, at the behest of the CEO/founder's wife, who carefully curated an interesting but-not-boundary-pushing collection of instructional and insightful images from the late 20th century. Or something like that. My own wife could speak more intelligently about the impact of all these paintings and sculptures and installations. The one that catches my eye, and everyone else's, is a wall-sized light installation that dominates the entryway lobby. It's a series of stripes etched into a marble edifice, lit from within by different colors at different, seemingly random, times of the day.

Today, my day ended red. By the time I turned out of the parking garage and looked through the glass wall of the building facade, it had shifted to half-red, half-blue, but that's not what counts. What counts is the color it shows on my way out the door, when I'm done with my day's labors and ready to engage in the desires of my real self, the one unconnected to work duties or politics. Today was red, so I got fairly drunk in public.

Some people believe in astrology. Some people believe that the orientation of the Earth toward the heavens upon the day of their birth -- and not even the accurate orientation of the Earth where they were born, but the planet's orientation according to Greeks who lived millennia ago -- will somehow dictate their personalities and the outward events of their days. Even though that's a patently ridiculous notion that depends on so many blind faiths that even the craziest cult can find something to laugh at about it, plenty of people read their horoscopes "for entertainment" and engage with strangers on the level of "which of 12 arbitrary star configurations were assigned to you upon the day you arbitrarily slid out of a birth canal?" So, you know, nothing wrong with me deciding how to feel or how to act based on a seemingly random pattern of light colors in an art installation at my office. Same thing, and all that.

Here's the pattern that seems to be emerging. And it's totally accurate, most of the time.

Blue: quiet evening, deep conversation

Red: get that drink on with your bad self

Green: buy something you can't entirely afford

Blue with Red: get drunk at home

Blue with Green: order pizza

Red with Green: drink something expensive

Yellow, by itself or in combination with any other color: find something else to do outside the plans or normal routine, OR ELSE.