I felt the helplessness of every mother who sees her child fall ill. I watched my daughter’s eyes glaze over. She turned to me, her cheeks flush, her voice rasping as she asked if I had any fabric she could use. I knew I would just have to let the fever run its course, supplying plenty of liquids, measuring tapes and sketchpads.
In my world, television is bad. Bad, bad, bad. Cable has made it bad central 24-7 thanks to the latest bit of dangerous programming. Home decorating shows.
Sure, they sound innocuous. What harm could there be in a program full of industrious people slapping on a few coats of paint? Riiight. Have you noticed that every addictive substance sound harmless at first? I’ll just have one donut. Just one. Before you know it you are at Donuts Anonymous, working through step one (Hi, I’m Winter and I’m a donutaholic. It has been 2 hours since my last glaze).
Having learned that the cartoon channel rarely has things I want to watch with my child, I had surfed over to what I thought was safe. After an hour I realized with horror that I had exposed my child to the most dangerous people on television—interior designers.
My seven-year-old succumbed completely. She had caught the design-on-a-dime disease, the designer challenge chill, the free-style fever.
I recognized the symptoms quickly, having been a victim of this infection many times myself. Only my own hapless remodeling attempts have served as a vaccination against the “Hey, I can do that!” interior design virus.
How do you know when you’ve contracted this horrible contagion? As a community service I’m providing some of the early warning signs:
The first symptom – You have a sudden affection for bright wall colors that normally you’d never consider for an interior of a circus wagon, let alone your living room.
The second symptom—You find yourself searching for your sewing machine that hasn’t seen the light of day since Halloween’s disastrous princess costume debacle.
The third symptom—You actually believe that simple home wiring is no problem, completely blocking out the last time you tried to replace batteries in a sweet soprano singing teddy bear and turned him into a cackling and hissing baritone.
The fourth symptom—You walk into rooms and wave your arms expansively using phrases like “Sensible Chic” and “Moroccan Inspired.”
I felt the helplessness of every mother who sees her child fall ill. I watched my daughter’s eyes glaze over. She turned to me, her cheeks flush, her voice rasping as she asked if I had any fabric she could use. I knew I would just have to let the fever run its course, supplying plenty of liquids, measuring tapes and sketchpads.
The next day fabric hung from the speakers and lamps in the living room, new drawings were tacked up with masking tape and pillows had been gathered and rearranged into piles. It was a mess, but an inspired one, and we tripped over it for a week.
Recently we decided to try to live without cable all together. It’s a radical move, I know, but it may be the only way to prevent a relapse of sponge painting, fabric draping and furniture recovering. Of course my daughter and I are going to miss that faux painting show. Unless… Maybe Grammy can tape it for us! Er, um, just this once, of course.
About Winter Prosapio
Hilarious, it’s a strange virus that one you speak of that afflicts all who get infected with the desire to knock down walls, buy portable drills and other stupid gadgets from diy stores in order to create the ‘latest post-modernist inspired blah blah blah’.
Thanks for this, gave me a good laugh, if only because I know I’ve been infected also
Iddiy’s last blog post..If You Watch Grand Designs, You Can Be An Interior Designer