I sacrificed my entire Saturday in the service of small d democracy, once again. In years past, the biennial reorganization meetings were busy in-person events, with a lot of networking, key issues raised, multiple candidates for officer positions to evaluate, and active voting by raising our color-coded credentials up for volunteers to count. These days, all business is conducted via Zoom, which is good considering how often I drowned out the sound coming from my cell phone with soupy coughing. I didn't get a shower until the lunch break, and ate food between my house district and senate district breakout meetings. In the entire day of central committee reorg, I actively voted one single time, for a minor officer role in our house district committee. For every other issue and candidate, all I had to do was be present on the call (to provide quorum), and not object during unanimous consent. I've had worse experiences with this party, that's for sure.
When I was in middle school, the bedroom I lived in, back in our ancestral home, was one that had been painted deepest, darkest green, in the hopes of keeping my then-infant brother sleeping past dawn. Blackout curtains completed the cave effect. I tolerated the color for about two years, before I started pleading with my parents to let me paint it the brightest "chalk white" they could find. I had reached my limit with the dark room. I don't remember if it was the summer before or after 8th grade, but one of those years, I went away to summer camp, and came back to find they had painted it without me. I was disappointed that I didn't get to do it, but I couldn't really be mad that they gave it to me as a fun surprise, especially since they added a unique twist. This was around 1980, and Garfield the cat was suddenly huge then. My step-dad painted a giant Garfield comic strip on the wall, like 8 feet of black art on my vivid white walls. No one else had anything like this, and I loved the crap out of it. That room stayed like that for at least 10 years, I think, until my mom decided to grow the space up a bit, and painted it a color she equated to cholesterol.
When we first moved into this house, every room was the same antique white. The contractor who fixed up this former rental just got a couple five-gallon buckets of it and covered everything. I experimented with colors I'd never tried before to get rid of the relentless white. A pale blue living room. A seafoam green bathroom. A freaking lilac craft room! But my bedroom was sort of something we had tried before. I wanted a neutral taupe, and I let Mr S-P pick it out. I think he came home with something called "mushroom." It was fine, but it really did end up being another dark cave. Now that I'm past a lot of my hide-in-my-room medical issues (not coming back knock on wood), I'm making almost as extreme of a trajectory change as that summer of 1980. I'm looking at colors like "warm milk," and "halogen." The lightest colors look better in the weird light of my ceiling fan. No decisions until I see it in different angles of sunlight.
As of right now, I'm not planning on a comic strip mural. I reserve the right to change my mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment