The living room has been painted a lovely greeny~gray.
For some reason Boyfriend insisted on doing it all himself, and he finished most of the priming & painting while I was at work. He said since I chose the colour, he gets to paint...
I'm beginning to think that home renovation is really an exercise in problem solving between couples... either you bond together over it ~ or it breaks you.
It's very important to Boyfriend to own a house of some kind; I think that's why he's so keen on watching those home renovation shows, and why he was perfectly happy to paint the entire livingroom himself. I'm not keen on owning a house; I see it as a big, expensive pet which I will be expected to clean up after, and then pay huge bills on when it gets old & sick... I'm happy to commit to the pets I have, but it would have to be one heck of a house to warrant that kind of devotion {I know, I'm supposed to look at a house as an investment, but I've never been able to perceive the world in terms of the money it can make for me}.
And I've never been entirely swept off my feet by home makeover shows, either; the results almost always end up reminding me of interior design/home~improvement articles from vintage magazines ~~ remember the home remodeling for handymen issues of Popular Mechanics?* It just aggrieves me to think how dated those made~over rooms will look in a few years...
There are now so many home renovation shows out there that I'm beginning to wonder if there's some sociological significance to this trend. Why are these shows so bloody popular?
Could it be one of those mass consumption things? Perhaps it is simply that the nature of the medium of TV is better suited to programs whose raison d'être is "out with the old, in with the new."
Could it be influenced in part by the home centers who derive benefit from sponsoring them {being that they are essentially half~hour commercials extolling the joys of home remodelling with little 60~second commericals for home centres stuck in~between}? It must be lucrative.
Could they have tapped in to a common thread that runs though all of our psyches? Most of us have a place we call home; shelter is one of the basic needs. I can just imagine some producer blithering on about "cocooning", or some dramaturg blathering on about man vs. environment, or some grad student blustering through a Master's thesis on "Home Renovator as Protagonist"...
We are so defined by our homes that homeless people have next to no status in our society. Think of the degrees of respectability between living in a vehicle, a bachelor apartment, a duplex, an uptown loft, or a split~level bugalow with two~car garage and yards to mow...
Paranoid Moment Sidebar:
Sometimes I feel {that's feel, as opposed to think ~ I'm not trying to claim I have brilliant flashes of insight, and I doubt this paranoid feeling would stand up to a good think~through} that this is how a culture's standard of living is maintained: if you don't meet the standard, then you simply don't count; so you are compelled to reach those minimum standards in order to participate in whatever society you're in.
That weird little feeling creeps up on me every time I'm asked to provide my driver's license as identification, and I have to tell them I don't have one because I've never learned to drive, which nets me disbelief, exasperation and sometimes outright suspicion. I've run into circumstances where a driver's license was considered the only acceptable form of photo ID, and in those circumstances I'm unable to prove my identity until I get at least a learner's permit.
I can't help but feel it's odd that in order to receive what is considered a fundamental piece of identification I am required to pay money to learn a skill, pay money to pass a test of this skill, pay money for a vehicle & its insurance, pay money to be granted the ID, and then pay money for the rest of my {driving} life to have it renewed.
Perhaps, deep down, I feel the same way about having a home. Who knows?
Paranoid Sidebar Over, Relative Sanity Recommences Here:
I'm thinking we could paint the hallway off the livingroom a Pale Hound...
Hm...
Maybe renovation programs are escapist. For those of us who long for home...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
* First published in 1902, it was "written so you can understand it" since 1903 until that tagline was dropped in 1960. What changed, I wonder?
Posted by edgar at September 18, 2003 09:44 AM
