In many ways, college is a lot like preschool. You nap in the afternoon, eat mediocre food, and spend a lot of time missing your mom.
In the past year or two, a fad has taken over that has added to this list of similarities: coloring books. The real question is why adult coloring books didn’t exist sooner.
They’re an excellent de-stressor and a great way to waste your time. You can color in endless patterns of mandalas and mosaic-y things with the few colorful pens you found at the bottom of your backpack, instead of doing all of the homework you’ve been assigned! You can color while you’re watching Netflix, because you’re such a competent ~multi-tasker~, or you can even color with your friends!
You could have a coloring party! A coloring wedding!! K maybe not though because you wouldn’t want to risk your dress getting marker on it. Remember in preschool, when you just perpetually had ink on your hands at all times? What was the deal with that anyway?? See, this would happen if you had a coloring wedding, except the ink would be on your dress.
Anyway, back to the books. If all of this isn’t enough, there are Facebook pages and Instagram accounts entirely dedicated to adult coloring books.
Is this fad weird? Yes, yes it is. But that doesn’t make it any less fantastic. The world is kinda stressful sometimes, (and especially stressful now #election2016 #stillwithher) but knowing that you can go home to your coloring book makes things better for some people!
The first time I filled out a page in an adult coloring book, I was in my friend’s dorm room. She ripped out a page from her book and handed it to me, and a rush of immeasurable excitement washed over me. I could finally try this cool new~trend~! Would my creation be insta worthy?! I was especially excited because she had all these pretty pens and stuff that she had bought specifically for this purpose.
But oh. my. god. it. was. so. boring. How did people do it? I picked this nice looking tree that had about 20,000 leaves and after I had colored several in with a turquoise marker, I was like bored out of my mind.
Why was this an activity that people chose to do?! That was the only thing I could think as I suffered through the first five or six leaves. But I pushed through and discovered that boredom can actually be kind of nice. Shocking, I know. It turns out that when you’re juggling 5 classes, 4 student orgs, and a bunch of crazy friends it’s kinda nice to not do anything.
So in conclusion, I support coloring books! It’s a better use of your time than most de-stressing activities, and you can develop your artistic skills instead of slumping in front of the TV/laptop/etc. Sometimes it’s nice to ignore the evil orange man on the TV and instead focus on the orange marker in your hand, which is filling in the lion that you’re coloring, very…very…very…slowly.