Wednesday, December 20, 2006

The non-decorating brain

Of all the things in my life that people keep requiring that I justify, the weirdest one that keeps coming up is the fact that I don't decorate. I don't just mean xmas decorations (although I don't do those either), I mean any interior decoration whatsoever. The walls of my apartment are the same standard-issue colour that they were when I moved in. My furniture is almost all yoinked from my parents' house. My curtains are red because that's my favourite colour and my mother asked me what colour curtains I want. I don't have any art, apart from a few kiddie-drawings and a few mi-cielito drawings, all pinned to a bulletin board. (Why a bulletin board? Because I've always had one.)

People take this as a sign of not being grownup - still living like a poor student. But really it's a sign that my brain just doesn't do decorating. Really. I am aware that, in theory, this is not the optimal colour for the walls, but I am quite simply incapable of thinking of a better colour. If you showed me a swatch and asked me if I want that colour on my walls, the best-informed answer I could come up with is "dunno." I know that my rugs are fugly, but I can't go to the store and look at rugs and figure out which one would be better. Yes, I probably should have new furniture, but my eyes just glaze over when I go into a furniture store. I've picked up a few pieces of design theory along the way, but my brain simply does not process colour and texture and coordination. I read the condo section of the Toronto Star every week and it always has all kinds of "decorating ideas," but I am congenitally incapable of extrapolating from "decorating ideas" to "something I can do to make my apartment look better." Everything just scans as "not applicable." This is also why, apart from the occasional attempt to make a vase of flowers not die, I don't decorate seasonally. The part of the brain that sees a decoration and thinks "This would look good in such-and-such a place" just isn't functional in me. Despite the protests of the annoying contingent who say "Of course you can decorate! You just have to put your mind to it! Be creative! Decorating is fun!" my brain simply does not work in that direction. It's too busy inventing stuff and thinking of analogies and automatically tracking the etymological roots of the made-up alien languages that Hoshi Sato speaks.

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