The Pepto Pink Palace, in living color:
See the whole optical illusion thing, as it happens? Must admit the effect was much better before. With a smaller picture, the zigging and zagging were all over. Just readily producing nausea with a side dish of dizziness.
The house inside seems to be doing this same thing, to both of us.
Insomnia, nausea, dizziness and headaches are hitting both Bean and I, long before the new fabu color scheme.
It has to be something in this house, but what? I toy daily with the idea of moving, but having come to love my house, warts, failures, imperfections and all, the idea of leaving it behind is something like the notion of leaving behind someone I love. Not likely.
Call me crazy, but it is precisely the flaws in everything I find most endearing.
Anyone or anything can be perfect, for a time, but that’s unreal and not truly desirable.
As human beings, we’ve lost a lot of our natural senses of what is beautiful and wonderful through our forced saturation in advertising and media, with their constant messages of constant perfection as beauty. We’ve come to expect everything, and worse, everyone, to function and look in top form, all the time. From that, we’ve extrapolated a somewhat subconscious belief that flaws are undesirable or worthy of scorn. Not true. In actuality, the very things which make us most real, most lovable and memorable as people, what makes us shine, are the ways in which we are imperfect and prone to fail. It is in these where all learning and growth are stored, as well as beauty.
When we speak of houses having character, we’re talking of their distinctions, what separates, and we are still told these are admirable, in structures. Why then are we told the opposite, when it comes to people? If I don’t have my Pantene-shiny, long brown hair, Abercrombie and Fitch sweater, perfectly spaced eyes covered in Long Lash Maybelline mascara, why am I not only being told every minute of every day via advertisement that I am somehow inferior, but why are you believing it? And what would happen, God forbid, if I were to believe it, too?
Why, I’d go get those things to make me blend. To turn me into another gallon of Reiter Milk, perfectly homogenized, sitting up on a shelf under a spotlight, with no surprises in store.
In the 50’s, when advertising first began, a study was done to show producers how best to market their products to consumers. What was eventually deduced was that people will buy anything as long as they are made to feel inferior from its lack. Convince someone to feel insecure, to compare themselves and what they have or have not with other people, and you will get them to buy your product.
Sadly, this eventually culminated into American Idol, reality television and Tru-Green.
Who needs any of those things? The terminally insecure. Those who believe that comparison and competition are the only ways of life, and a person is only successful when they are besting another person in any given arena. That actual life goals should include your grass looking exactly as green as every other lawn on the street and that absolutely everything is a competition. Even one that results in no actual person becoming a musical star and leaves, instead, a bunch of neverbeens trotting across a nationwide circuit together, singing song written by people who actually had talent and success.
Thanks, but. . .well. . .No.
My first ever revolt was in junior high, though many more came later. It revolved around the hideous one piece gym suit — striped blue and grey on the top down to the middle, solid blue “shorts” from the middle down. Everyone had to don it in order to participate in gym. First, I just subverted: a little bandanna action, a belt now and again, and, since I loved them so much at the time, a hoodie over it. I got detentions.
Eventually, I decided not to wear it at all. What the hell real purpose did it serve? Yes, there was an argument that it helped with range of motion – but surely shorts and a top would work as well. So I tried that, and got a detention. And another. Eventually, I flunked gym – more than once.
Tried rallying people to my side, showing them that the simple act of willingly putting on an outfit that was exactly the same as that of everyone else would make their souls complicit in accepting conformity. That their willingness in doing this was the first slide down a slippery slope to selling-out.
This, not surprisingly, didn’t work.
It did work with the lunches we were served as employees at Westwood Country Club, and that resulted in a sit-down between me and the managers to discuss what was appropriate food to serve teens and college students – where I was given the nickname Norma Rae.
But that’s a whole different story.
The point is, before the tools of our society’s decline were filtered through square electrified boxes in our living rooms, we all knew better. We knew that character, separateness, being beautifully ensconced in our flawed selves was the most beautiful way of living. That each of our imperfections were personally handed to us by our Creator, as a challenge to rise above, a special marking that made us recognizable to the souls with whom we are inexorably bound as we work through this physical existence, or simply as a way to make us each beautiful.
We’ve lost that, and it’s costing us dearly in so many ways: in chemicals we use with the idiotic belief that we can actually improve on Nature, in money we waste living life as if it were a competition and something we can actually win, in the things we do and say that are inauthentic in some ill-advised attempt to fit-in. Because we spend way too much time wondering what “perfection” there is outside ourselves that is preventing us from feeling whole, and not realizing it is precisely the imperfections which we work so hard to hide which make us beautiful, and whole.
Maybe the pink shutters can stay, after all, and I’ll stay here with them, just as I am.
