I step out of the shower and onto the robin’s egg blue bathmat. I curl my toes in and try to stand on the outside of the soles my feet so that only the smallest surface area touches the mysteriously speckled mat. Where all that dark lint comes from baffles me. Who has lint on their toes after they come out of the shower? Those fuzzies should be washed away by the shower water, shouldn’t they? Maybe one of my roommates isn’t scrubbing their feet hard enough. Slightly icked out by the thought of my roommates’ dirty toes, I quickly slip my still wet feet into my brown shower flip-flops and wrap myself in my oversized purple terry-cloth towel. It’s not as soft as it was when I first bought it at Bed Bath and Beyond, nor is the color – purple – as unique. My new roommates’ towel is the same color. That annoys me. Now I have to pay close attention when I grab for my towel after a shower to make sure it’s mine – the one on the left. Copycat.

Purple is my signature color. Let me set the record straight on two facts about purple:

1) I loved purple long before I came to NYU, and

2) The NYU school color is not purple, it is violet. So there really is no connection.

For those of you who don’t know, this year the NYU All-University Commencement was held at Yankee Stadium since Washington Square Park is under massive construction. It was such a different atmosphere than I had ever anticipated for my college graduation, and I’m sorry to say that it wasn’t my ideal environment. It seemed informal, arbitrary, large and impersonal. It certainly did not give me the kind of closure I was looking for. Maybe I shouldn’t have expected closure in the first place, but there it is. Or rather, there it wasn’t.

Further offset by the heat and how far away the speakers were from the graduates, the ceremony didn’t feel like a ceremony at all, more like a badly timed performance with a rowdy audience. Take for example the now famous streaker:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=pstGb4a2klM&feature=related

I can’t decide whether I love this kid or think he’s the most obnoxious thing to walk the planet. I know this kind of thing happens all the time, but really it was just ridiculous – that electric-purple robe flowing around his skinny knees as he rounded home plate and was tackled to the ground by an overflow of security guards. And the Tisch singers and their cheesy rendition of “New York, New York” in the background only sweetened the pot. Was the crowd booing or cheering, or both? For the singers or the streaker? Or both?

There was so much purple there that day. Violet. Purple. Too close for comfort. I feel the need to reclaim the color purple from this mockery of a commencement. This may be a little too memoir-ish for a blog post, but I ask you to indulge me.

I can trace my love of the color purple back to a conversation I had with my step-grandpa when I was probably younger than ten. The inside of their house was a mix of browns, retro paisleys, potted plants, and wall-sized corkboards in the kitchen with collages of tiny photos of people in our family. I used to spend family dinners in the dining room trying to spear cherry tomatoes on my fork and zoning out to adult conversation while counting how many pictures of me I could find on the walls. I always lost track somewhere around twenty.

My step-grandpa Stan is one of my favorite people in the world, and I brag that I’m even closer to him than to my “actual” grandpa who lives in Florida and mixes me up with my sister and sometimes even my mother. Grandpa Stan has a big Jewish nose and a bushy gray moustache that is perfect for tickling. He is the kind of person that can sense when you were getting stressed out and tries to make you feel better. Sitting on the couch at family gatherings he would gently rub the back of my neck. He knew I absorbed the unspoken (and sometimes over-spoken) family tensions. While my mom yelled at my aunt for putting apples in the salad without asking her, Grandpa Stan talked to me about school and rubbed my neck. It felt like a way for him to try to absorb the stress out of me.

One day at a visit to my grandparents’ house house, I was admiring and touching their antique collection of World War I soldier figurines on the bookcase in the living room while Grandpa Stan worked at his desk. He had a bunch of books of cloth out in front of him, as well as graph paper, a T-square, pencils, and gummy erasers that always smelled a little musty. He designed cabinets and wall units for people’s homes. Thinking back to how retro their house is, I wonder what he’s like as a designer. I wonder if he plasters paisleys all over his clients’ couches.

He would let me flip through the cloth books, and when he didn’t need them anymore he gave them to me in big paper shopping bags. I liked to cut them up to sew clothes for my stuffed animals and dolls. I asked him what his favorite color was, and he said it was purple. I thought that was pretty silly.

“Purple?” I laughed, “that’s a girl color!” I didn’t reach my feminist peak until high school.

“Emily, I’m an interior decorator,” he said, “I’m allowed to like purple.”

It followed that since I thought my grandpa was the coolest person in the world, obviously the color purple was the coolest color in the world, so it became my favorite color.

My grandpa’s been in my life a long time – much longer than NYU. NYU has nothing to do with my love of purple.

Really I just want to separate myself from college. I’m not a kid anymore, even if I still hold onto my favorite childhood color. Even if there isn’t always someone there to rub my neck anymore, at least colors don’t change.