Hamlette's Soliloquy

Tonight, I fulfulled a longtime ambition. I painted the walls of a room. Not a room in my own Crypt, but that's beside the point.

When I was in high school, my friend Jewels decided to paint her room green. And for some reason, maybe I was sick or on a family vacation or something, I didn't get to help her. Freestargirl did, but I didn't. And it seemed like the coolest thing ever to be able to paint your walls a color other than some variant of white.

Growing up in a pastor's family, I always lived in parsonages. And the walls of the parsonages were invariable white or off-white, because before a new pastor came to a church, the congregation would paint the walls of the parsonage. But who knows what colors the new pastor's furnishings will be, right? So paint the walls white, because white goes with everything. Makes total sense, but because the house didn't belong to us and had just been freshly painted anyway, my dad would never let us repaint any rooms. I could put up posters and hang pictures to my heart's content, but not paint the walls.

So when Jewels painted her room grass green, there was born in me the great desire to paint walls. It seemed like such a fulfilling activity, seeing the new color take over the blank blah-ness of the old white walls. The whole concept of the paint roller fascinated me. I used to walk through the paint aisles in home improvement stores or hardware stores and imagine opening a can, pouring it out into a pan, and rollering it onto the walls. But I never got to.

I almost had the chance to paint walls when my parents moved into a new parsonage the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. They were staying at the same congregation but moving into a different house, and the whole thing needed to be repainted. Sure, my dad insisted it all be painted white or off-white so that the next pastor wouldn't be stuck with mauve walls or whatever, but it still would have been exciting. Except they managed to schedule every single painting session for the exact times and days that I was working at my summer job. Room after room got painted, and I had nothing to do with any of it.

So now, ED just bought a house and is in the process of repainting nearly every room. I went over there tonight and she and I primed and painted her guest bedroom. We painted it this greyish purple color (more purple than grey) called Phoenix. And it was awesome. It was every bit as fun as I'd imagined :-D