My parents are helping me redecorate my apartment as an early birthday present - mostly because if I tried to paint solo, it would lead to the grown-up version of Alexander and the No Good, Very Bad, Horrible...whatever, you get the point.
I love my new lamps. My inner perfectionist is so unbelievably relieved to have my pictures rehung, centered and in line with one another, on my walls. I love my new dulce de leche bathroom walls, which, by the way, match my beautiful shower tile perfectly. I got adorable new towels with graphic little flowers on them. My mom made me gorgeous pillows for my bed and sofa out of sari fabric. It's awesome.
But, oh, me and my big ideas: I wanted to paint a wall (just one!) a fabulous, deep, maroon-y, lipsticky, not-pink, not-red, not-burgundy color. I decided on a paint chip named Luscious. (Seriously.) When my dad opened up the gallon of saturated girliness, there was, I am not ashamed to admit, dancing on my part reminiscient of a football player scoring a touchdown.
But then we began to paint.
We did not read the paint can. (Who does this? No one. But, oh, dear children, please learn from our mistakes.)
We did not let each coat of paint dry for 5-6 hours. (Seriously. I know. It's a long time.) It got gloppy. The wet paint on the wall was some alien bastard child of hair gel, Cyndi Lauper, and Jell-O instant pudding mix. When it dried, the wall showed every brush stroke and roller crease, and was 30 splotches of color instead of one uniform, eggshell block. It was like an imitation-Rothko in the worst way, like those faux finishes that 80s housewives paid lots of money for...
Thank G-d, my parents are coming to fix my wall tomorrow while I am at work, and it will be a homogenous, velvety smooth, saturated wall of joy soon. But, as I lay in bed last night, laughing because there really is nothing else you can do when you've applied 3 coats of pink pudding to your walls, I realized: I didn't like the primer showing through, I was irked by the striations and variations in the color, and I was frustrated by our inability to fix the wall. I had lost control. Things were out of my hands. And I was annoyed. Whoa - not okay.
Life is out of my control. Every person that I love and hold dear has a bit of their past peeking through into their present, every situation that is meaningful and lesson-laden doesn't go as planned, and every moment is different, varied, unique from the next. I have to learn to let go. To let things be. To take life as it is, to make of it what I can, and to be at peace with that.
My outlook has to be more flexible. The pink pudding look, however, has got to go.
