“What’s your favourite colour?” is a very decent question.
Any person under the age of ten knows this instinctually; it’s part of a social code. “Your favourite colour’s blue? Mine too!” Thus begins a prosperous friendship.
“Turn to the person next to you,” Mum said on my first day of kindergarten, “and ask them their favourite colour”. This sounded like a grand plan to me. So much of our exterior identities could be wrapped up in these shallow signifiers. If I could know that Claudia B on my table liked the colour green, I could tell you I knew her and that she was my friend.
I still remember some of these preferences, and that strikes me as peculiar. My best friend liked blue, my ‘crush’ favoured orange. My favourite was pink, I told them, because of the bougainvillaea planted outside my bedroom. Nothing to do with my hunger for sparkly plastic.
Things haven’t changed much. You might not exchange favourite colours in first tutorials, unless as part of a gruelling ice-breaker, but you’ll probably see the Doc Martens-wearers all huddled up together. I can’t help but ask if there’s a social significance. Is this why we all wear bows now? Self-expression is a strange thing. We are tasked with the challenge of conveying our strangeness in exactly the right measure, through exactly the right lens. Hopefully, you have a strangeness common enough to find someone who is strange in just the same way.
Loneliness encroaches on our generation like a shadowed spectre, and vast access to niche media pockets has exacerbated social gaps. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says an increasing number of young people experience loneliness. Some University professors seem to think that all students need to do is open a crayon box and share their favourites. “I like the purple because it reminds me of the Quad’s jacaranda.” “Really? Red’s my favourite. It reminds me of the ‘DANGER’ asbestos signs!”
I have this friend, Tom, and his favourite band is Pixies. At least, this is what the tee-shirt he wears to Room 402 every second Thursday when his laundry cycle repeats says to me. He wears moc toe boots and talks a painful amount about late-stage capitalism. I sit behind him in Room 402, a little to the left. I like the Pixies too. So says the sticker on my laptop. We share a nod: to his shirt, to my laptop. In a way, we have the same favourite colour.
I still feel like a bewildered six-year-old, stretched out into a big kid’s body — and yet I defend the business of small-talk and other banalities. I believe in “What’s your favourite colour?” There’s no better way to fast-track a friendship than volunteering extraneous details. Chances are, the person at your table this semester might not be your soulmate. But you could sit a little more comfortably knowing that neither of you is alien.
If I tell you I think pink is my favourite, will you be my desk buddy all semester-long?