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Walls that are white or beige indicate to me that there is no personal ownership of the room. When I last owned a room, I painted it orange, because I was the only one that had any say in the matter, and I wanted orange.

Now, all my rooms are white.

And almost all of my furniture is crappy, flat-pack, self-assembly particle-board dreck. That's because my preference for durable, quality furniture is overridden by my ever-declining wage relative to my expenses, and my need to move around frequently in search of jobs that allow me to tread water a bit longer at my current standard of living.

I want a nice chair, but I also want something to sit on until I can afford one. It always seems that the price of a chair I could keep until the day I die increases faster than my ability to pay for one. And so I live in a cheaply developed suburban subdivision, in a cheaply built home, on cheaply constructed furniture, using a discounted laptop. And all the while, things crumble around me, and I constantly find myself paying to replace the cheap things that I only have in the first place because I am trying to save up enough to buy the nice, durable things that I really want. And those recede into the distance faster than I can chase them.

My American room is devoid of decoration, because I no longer have any sense of ownership. It makes no sense to personalize a place that is not mine. It makes no sense to invest emotion and effort into something that you feel in your heart to just be temporary.

And in the end, I live a temporary life, plodding through endless mundane todays in search of an extraordinary tomorrow. Everything that I own is junk that I never wanted to keep. Everything that I really want dangles just barely out of my reach.

And all the time, I am angry and frustrated, because all I ever wanted is quality. And I can't afford it. The walls behind my webcam aren't blank, white, and empty. They're covered in the corpses of my dead dreams and aborted aspirations. Those gothy types think black is the color of despair. But it's really eggshell semi-glossy.

I have plenty of decorations to hang up. But they are still packed up and ready to move--again--because there is no longer any wall that I can say is my wall. All those white walls out there belong to someone else. All those videos just show that someone else controls the backdrop of your life.

And I just want to get out my brush and paint. It. All. Red.



Ah, the Vimes "boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness:

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...


Get a divorce. Quit your government contract job. Move.


I thought ramping the angst up to full throttle at the end there would have made it obvious, but apparently Poe's Law strikes again.


Could use a few more IKEA and/or Fight Club references ;)


Beautiful.




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