Use of Colors in this
Technique
The use of colors to learn or use this technique is not
necessary. I devised it only as a tool to learn the values for the month and
the day-of-the-week quickly and, more importantly, as a safety net just in
case I forgot a number while I was still reprogramming my brain with the
numbers themselves.
If you decide to use colors, there is no law, of course,
that says you have to use the colors I chose to use. If you wish to use the
rainbow colors and order, be my guest. Use whatever works for you best. Colors
work best for me, to the extent I need them now at all. But now when I see
February I think green; when I think of Friday I see the color red. It actually adds color to my days.
I use the colors/numbers only for the month and
day-of-the-week values, although I guess you can devise some association for
the 4 century values and perhaps even the year values, if you choose to
memorize them instead of computing them. Here are the mnemonics
I use. (Sorry, but a few of them tend toward being risqué but that’s the way my
mind works, and it works here.)
I do not use any mnemonic for January
(0) since it is the first in the list and all my firsts start with zero
(month, centuries, years, days-of-week).
February (3) should
be easy to compute (as long as you know how) since you know that there are
three days beyond (4) full weeks in January (31 days).
March is just as
easy because February (in a non-leap year) has 28 days, four full weeks, so
there is no additional carryover. But if you need a better mnemonic, out of
respect for Pope Gregory, the inventor of the calendar, since he built the
calendar on Christ’s birth, I think of 33 as the age Christ was when he died,
the second 3 applying to March, below.
April (6) I associate with
the song, “April Love” and where there is love there is usually sex, which is
the Roman numeral for six. Or just think of love as the color red i.e., the
heart), which is the value for 6. If this does not work, try this: the 4th
month is 6 and the 6th month (June) is 4.
May (1) I associate
with the child’s game, “May I”, the I looking like a 1. Or think the sun coming
out in May, and the sun is yellow, or 1.
June (4) I associate
as being FOR (i.e., 4) brides (wedding).
Also, remember “the 6th month is 4 and the 4th
month is 6”.
July (6) I associate
with the 76 in July 4th 1776, that is, the 7th month is
6, i.e., 7-6. also think RED for July for the fireworks, red being the color
for 6.
August (2) I associate
with 2 weeks vacation, perhaps under blue skies, blue being the color of 2.
September (5) is the
9th month and it holds Labor Day. Think people laboring from 9-5
each day.
October (0) has the
same calendar as January (in non-leap years anyway). But think of its number 0
coming from the letter O, the first letter in October.
November (3) I think
of as the time when all the trees are dead, but instead of trees I think of
threes. And 3 is the color of trees, green.
December (5) I
associate with a month of giving (gifts). And the number that looks closest to
gIVing is the number fIVe.
Here are my mnemonics for the
days of the week.
Sunday (1): sun
sounds like 1. Sun is also yellow, as is the number 1. Sunday is also the first
day of the week so that is easy to remember.
Monday (2) reminds
me of blue Monday, and blue sounds like 2. Think also of blue moon.
Tuesday (3) has two
Es in it, as does the word three and the color green.
Wednesday (4) starts
off with WED, and wedding dress are usually white (the number 4), or think June
when weddings usually occur (or they used to before people stopped getting
married).
Thursday (5), has
parts of the world purple in it (the UR
Friday (6) is a good
dating night and where there are dates (it is hoped with love attached) there
is sex, and sex is six, which is the color red, a hot color. And speaking of
hot, if you are more included to cooking than sex, think that you need a
red-hot fire to cook by or to fry something, and FRY looks like the FRI in
Friday.
Saturday (0, a.k.a.
7) is an easy one because it looks like SATurn and Saturn, as a planet, looks
like a big O, or 0 in this case. If you
need a color, just pretend that Saturn is the orange planet in the sky, and organize
is 0. To think of the number seven, think of Saturdn as one of the Seven
starts in the sky.
For the numbers, here’s what I use. There is some
duplication with the above, and that is good.
One sounds like SUN,
which is yellow. Also, strip off the two arms off Y and you are left with something
that looks like a 1.
Two sounds like
blue.
Three has two Es in
it like the color green.
Four is like June
which has four letters and which is FOR brides, which signifies white,
etc. But also think of flour, which is white.
Five is purple. Think
of the big purple 5 on the back of the new 5-dollar bills.
Six is sex (the number)
which is red. Think of red-hot sex.
Seven is orange because
it is really 0, which is similar to the first letter in orange, like Saturn,
one of the seven stars in the sky.
See “The Seven Stars in the Sky” display to the right, which is how this
whole 7-day week got started by the Mesopotamians in 2350 B.C., by Pope Gregory
in 1582, and me in 1986.
