All of the beautiful colors

I am having a housewarming party this weekend. Actually, it's a housewarming/birthday party (and maybe we just added the "housewarming" part because I really just wanted to throw myself a birthday party but didn't want to be all, "Hey, come to my BIRTHDAY party which is all about ME and where I will wear a pink sparkly BIRTHDAY CROWN and flit about like a social butterfly princess because it is MY BIRTHDAY yes, ME ME ME." I try to reserve the narcissistic princess strutting for my personal website.)

Here are the things that must be done before we are delightfully swamped with a deluge of Party Guests:

• Rip out the dead marigolds and replace with yet-to-be-purchased flowering plants. Preferably floweirng plants that won't keel over and die from extreme underexposure to sunlight.
• Bake one double triple chocolate fudge cake with melted-chocolate-bar frosting and possibly a chocolate pudding swirl. Bake one cheesecake with strawberry topping for the president of the Chocolate-Free America Coalition as he, unfortunately, lives with me. How did that happen?
• Hang at least one picture. JUST ONE.
• Hem the curtains in the second bedroom as they are puddled on the floor and look ridiculous. Spend several minutes each morning in the second bedroom affirming my choice of yellow walls, butterfly curtains, pink futon cover and toys on the bookshelf because it is PERFECTLY OKAY to share the decorating preferences of a six-year-old.
• PAINT.

It's that last one, friends in the computer, that is causing me no small bit of grief. I did some painting when we first moved in and after that I was DONE. I did not want to be that intimate with the corners of my bedroom walls ever again. Banish the blue tape! But then I visited my sister-in-law and spent 3 out of my 4 days at her house discussing what color to paint the accent wall in her kitchen. There were paint chips coming out of our ears and we went back to the paint store to get more. I released the inner Martha Stewart and talked a load of crap about warm colors and themes and whether or not a particular shade of red had blue or yellow undertones. I was organized, I was decisive, and I helped SIL avoid a panic attack by finding the perfect red, somewhere between Marilyn Monroe lipstick and dirty bricks. Better than that, I was inspired. My plain blank walls were quivering in fear.

So yesterday I went to Lowes and spent an hour in front of the paint chips. WHY IS THIS SO HARD? My first problem is that the colors I want don't particularly match. The Interior Decorator member of the Thursday Night TV Gang is adamant about your home having a Theme and that you shouldn't feel disjointed and anxious just by moving from the living room to the powder room. (And she really says "powder room" and I can never say that without a nervous snicker about my descent into Obnoxious Pretentiousness.) Anyway, that's just to say that I'm not allowed to paint my powder room pink, as all powder rooms should be, and I can't paint the wall around the fireplace a bright red and I can't paint the entry way sky blue. I picked out every shade of Light Beigey Brown and showed them to the Interior Decorator last night and, with a face that said "I have just eaten Deep Fried Worm", she declared my paint chips to be leftover samples from Revlon's recent staff meeting on foundation and tossed them in the garbage. Wah.

My inner Martha Stewart is feeling a bit wounded at this point. I'm going to use the rest of the lime green paint we used in the bedroom in the guest bathroom upstairs, themes be damned. After that I'm lost. Deep red? Too claustrophobic. Neutral brown? Brown is blah. And boring. Orange is... orange. Maybe a blue? Or green? I'm having a party in FIVE DAYS. PLEASE SEND HELP.

Comments

[matt]

purple and gold man, purple and gold