Dispatches from the Lemon Tinted Nuclear Reactor
Posted by Moose on June 4th, 2006. Filed under: My Brain Needs a Drink.Moving is stressful. It fools you into thinking that the color of a wall is more important than household harmony.
My brief respite at the funny farm last week (otherwise known as mom’s house) gave me some small measure of sanity. Very small. These small stores are currently being siphoned away by the yellow wall behind me. When a yellow wall was suggested, I thought, “Yes. How lovely. How soothing. How quieting to the soul and mind.” What I really said was, “Yeah, sure.” But what’s the point of a blog if you can’t doctor your responses to cast yourself into a higher IQ range?
This wall would be soothing if it wasn’t a shade that made the man behind the counter at the paint store yell, “Neon! Painful! The goggles, they do nothing!” before flipping the yellow-painted paper over and covering it with a large notebook. (This was after the wall had been painted and the damage done.) The color is a shade I like to call “banana dying in the nuclear reactor.” Not only is the largest wall in our house an eyeball searing shade of concentrated lemon, it also clashes with our blonde bamboo floors. The clashing, it is profound. It is painful. My eyes are tearing up. My life force is being sucked away. I must lie prone on the floor for ten minutes at a time to regain the strength to clean the bathroom.
Necessary for this house to be liveable (in spite of the fact that we are already living in it) is to fix the wiring so the ceilings don’t explode in a blast of electricity and plaster (I’m not doing that), install a kitchen sink (not doing that either), order and install a washer and dryer (nope), cleaning the muck of eight months worth of construction worker’s use and no disinfectant from the bathroom (that one’s mine), haul the furniture from the basement, install kitchen counter tops, repaint the nuclear lemon wall, install light fixtures….
Have you wandered off to inspect your toes? Me too. That list isn’t finished. I’m not even sure how to finish it, there is that much to do.
I am not a person who does well amongst the chaos. I like to think that if the big one hit, the tsunami washes over, the apocalypse arrives, I would take charge, cutting serenely through the madness, wiping fevered brows and rebuilding bridges. In reality, I would be the one shrieking and flapping my hands in the corner, until someone considerately throws a sheet over my head.
We are living amongst chaos. I am not yet shrieking in the corner, but the bathroom is not yet clean. It is in a state of disrepair so daunting that I am going to keep typing as long as I can manage to avoid approaching it with a can of value size Comet and a grave sense of disquiet.
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