Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
I was a schooled musician. When I made 'Blue Velvet', I told everyone what to do. I was an arranger. I learned music in school I told the band to play this. I told the guitar to do that.
I used to take formal notes in lines of blue, and underline the key words in red, and I realised I needed only the key words and the idea. Then to bring in connections, I drew arrows and put in images and codes. It was a picture outside my head of what was inside my head - 'mind map' is the language my brain spoke.
Usually, I chalk Democratic dreams of a blue Texas to the same sort of thinking that brought us the inevitability of the coalition of the ascendant and 100% certainty that Donald Trump was going to lose.
As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.
I didn't have any look or any style in prison. Your footwear couldn't cost more than $50. You can't wear blue, orange, gray, any patterns, or you couldn't wear your hair down. There were just so many rules that coincided with your attire.
My first concert - maybe it was 1979 - was a blur. I'm not sure whether it was Blue Oyster Cult/Cheap Trick/Pat Travers at San Jose Civic Auditorium or The Police/The Knack/Robert Johnson at Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium.
I speak with a Northern Irish accent with a tinge of New York. My wife has a bit of a Boston accent; my oldest daughter talks with a Denver accent, and my youngest has a true blue Aussie accent. It's complicated.
As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America's macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her 'poor nerves.'
Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can't decide whether to wear blue socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies.
When I first met Jeff Bezos back in the late 90s, the only automated thing in his office was a rotating fan, gently blowing across a pair of identical blue shirts he'd hung on a water pipe behind his desk.
The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural... The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.
The highs were high, the awe, I'm not a religious person, but I'll tell you, to be in the azure blue of the Gulf Stream as if, as you're breathing, you're looking down miles and miles and miles, to feel the majesty of this blue planet we live on, it's awe-inspiring.
I understand now why Hillary Clinton always wore navy blue pantsuits. Remember, for four years? If you have one or two themes, then you have the same shoes, the same bag. Otherwise, it's a nightmare.
You can tap into culture by exploring what's grown or produced in the region, like going into the Blue Mountains in Jamaica to visit a coffee plantation or a rum distillery in Barbados.
I have learned how to wrestle. You end up battered and blue - but so happy.
I was never really a Mod. I thought I was more of a beatnik with the brown corduroy jacket, blue jeans, etc. I loved the music Mods liked, and I loved the clothes, but I didn't have any money to spend on them.
Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.
Not a lot of people take advantage of that opportunity of being different. A lot of kids that are highly touted coming out of high school, like, doing the traditional thing and going to the blue bloods and all that, but I was always different growing up.
There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.