Veni, Vidi, Ventus --
The randomly chaotic and crafty scribblings of a deranged, wannabe artist allowed too many colours in her Crayon box.

Surgeon General's Warning: Some content of "From Pooka's Crayon" may not be suitable for: work, blue-haired little old ladies, the politically-correct, rabid moonbats, uptight mothers, priests, chronic idiots, insurance claims agents, Democrats, children, small furry quadropeds from Alpha Centauri, or your sanity.

Tuesday, July 31, 2001

What Colour is Estrogen?

I can tell you what colour mine isn't -- pussy power pink.

After staring at an entire wall of that colour, I decided that I had somehow failed a vital test in Grrlyness. Boy, was it pink. Really pink. Really bright pink. Really girly fun pink.

Wow. That is seriously ... seriously ... Pink. We're talking John Cougar "Pink Houses" - "Paint the mother piyunk!" pink.

Pink. Pink in ways that seriously threaten testosterone. Pink in ways that could make a little boy curl into a fetal ball and weep for his mother. "Usul, we have pink the likes of which God has never seen." "Houston, that's an affirmative, we have Pink!"

Pink. Nothing in nature comes in this shade. Well, there was that one spider, but it was his own fault for climbing back into an area I'd previously prepped, and that wasn't nature but Darwin at work.

Christ. I've been sucking down too many paint fumes.

A wall and a door are completed in Petunia Pink. A door is done in Cornflower. The side of the room that will be Cornflower hasn't been scrubbed and primed yet.

DG has pretended to scrub one wall, and moved some furniture. He sat around and watched me put the primer on one door and the wall earlier. I asked him why he was just sitting and watching.

"You didn't tell me I could do anything else."

Stare.

I suppose I asked for this. After all, I blindly decided to embark on a detailed home improvement project with a man whose entire idea of spring cleaning consists of shoveling all the piles on his desk onto the floor to be kicked around for the next year until it's time to relocate them again.

I consider standing over him with a paint stick and a scowl until he scrubs the wall right and primes it. I know this won't work. I have no idea what will work, but I do know that isn't it.

So I take a break, ponder why it seems like there's a big hairy pink caterpillar creeping its way across my face, and consider going back in there and finishing the work by myself.

Wow. Um, I didn't know caterpillars had that many eyes. Or feet. Or tentacles.

And every damn one of them is pink.

Alice, move over.

3 comments:

Philosophical Karen said...

Hey, I know this is a way old post in your blog (July 2001) but I was looking around for gardening posts and found this painting post instead.

I think your house is my house, in a kind of twilight-zoney, "alternate universe" sort of way. We both have had our problems with pink paint, that's for sure.

Pooka said...

Either the blender screwed up, or the sample strip LIED! That pink was SO Very Amazingly Pink in all the wrong ways.

And of course Thing 2 loved it, probably because it made her sister's eyeballs want to bleed.

Philosophical Karen said...

Yeah, paint strips lie all right. I wanted a nice, restful, warm colour for the basement. The contractors started painting. My mom (who was in our house looking after Ben, who was in kindergarten at the time) phoned me at work and said, "You'd better come and see this."

We had a barbie pink basement! Ben was crying. "That is NOT the colour we are having in our basement." (I agreed with him!)

So, with much deference and kowtowing, I got the contractors to switch to a tamer shade of pink. It still didn't look right, though. Part of the problem was those energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs Mike insists on. They make everything look like... (I guess can say "hell" on your blog, can't I? HAHAHA)