Colorblindness

For those of you who don't know, I am indeed colorblind. Mostly red/green colorblind, to be exact. So what does this mean? Well, until my first year of college at UCLA, I didn't even know I was colorblind, so it honestly doesn't make that much of a difference. I found out that I was colorblind during my Psych 10 class, when there was one of those colorblind tests - the one where you're supposed to see a number in a bunch of colored dots.. and I couldn't see the number -_-

You know that part in Little Miss Sunshine when the son finds out that he's colorblind and flips out in the car? Yea.. my reaction was nothing like that haha. I mean, I had gone through my whole life just fine thinking that the colors I saw were the colors everyone else saw - I think it's just something that most people assume.

Being colorblind honestly doesn't bother me at all, but ever since I've found out I was colorblind, there are some instances where I found out things I never knew about from normal-vision people. For example, I just found out the other day that Microsoft Word actually has two different colors for underlining mistakes - one for grammatical and one for spelling. Definitely had no idea that those were different colors. About a month ago, I found out that the status dots on Gchat actually come in different colors too - green for available and red for busy. As you can see, these are definitely not life-altering revelations, but it does make me wonder what other things I will discover down the line that everyone else just seems to know. And the thing is, I won't discover these things unless a normal-vision person happens to bring it up in conversation, like the Microsoft Word incident. These little revelations are interesting. :)

When they find out I'm colorblind, people always ask me "Ooooh, what do you see?". And I never know what to tell them. It's not like I see black and white, I definitely see colors.. just not the colors that everyone else sees. And it's weird, because I have distinct ideas of what red and green are, but sometimes I can't tell them apart or can't tell if something is red or green. So in those instances where I can't tell if a color is red or green... what AM I seeing? Well, that's a really good question. It's hard to describe colors though - I mean, what would you say to someone if they asked you to describe the color blue?

Anyways, there have only been 3 actual instances I can remember where colorblindness has hindered me from doing something:

1. In a lecture when the teacher was using green and red sharpies do draw diagrams on the board.

2. In Mario Kart, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the red and green shells and I have to aim them like green shells just in case.

3. In tetris-like games based on matching colors together.

I'd also like to attribute my poor fashion sense to colorblindness too, but I'm pretty sure that's just me.