This happened like a month ago and I still cannot work out a plausible explanation for this bizarre incident.
I was walking home from work when I saw a young guy, probably early 20s, coming the opposite way on the sidewalk. He was, I would say, casually but smartly dressed - nice dark jeans, shirt tucked in, product in his hair. Like he was going on a first date, or to a sibling’s graduation or something. He was talking on the phone, and as we passed each other I heard him say -
“I’m almost there, I’m wearing a red shirt.”
Which is fine. EXCEPT.
He was clearly wearing a white shirt with a red stripe on it!
The stripe could not have been bigger than half an inch.
Why??
Why would you say that you were wearing a red shirt when it was patently not true?
I have brainstormed the following possible explanations:
He is colorblind.
He just misspoke.
He assigns some sort of value judgment to the color of his shirt, like, maybe he aspires to BE the kind of guy who owns a red shirt.
He was meeting someone for a first date and this was a trick to kind of throw them off, like a play from one of those pickup artist manuals that tells you to tell women they’re ugly or whatever
When he looks at the shirt, the white only reads to him as negative space, which would make the red stripe appear to him to be the actual color.
??????
By the way I am acutely aware that this does not matter in the slightest. In hard times, I find that vapid gossip about strangers is a true balm. But please, tell me if you can think of an explanation I have not shared here!!
I'm imagining he's going to some sort of event or party where there are teams for a game, maybe red and blue, and everyone is supposed to come dressed in their team colors, so even though there's white, the red is sufficient to signal his team/shirt color.
Or maybe a party with a color scheme, and he's reassuring the other person that he is indeed wearing red as promised, and as is often true of color schemes, white gets a free pass.