I’m color sensitive.

Wait. Is that a thing?

Could I have ‘Color Affective Disorder’?

CAD?

Oh my Gawd, I think I do. I really do! I have suffered from this my whole life. This makes so much sense! Color matters to me. It totally affects my mood, and when other people look at a paint color fan and say something like ‘white is white is white’?

I just have to remove myself from the situation.

I can remember, sitting in my bedroom when I was little and looking at the wallpaper. There were ballerinas on it, and my mother explained the background as being ‘pink and white striped’ but I always thought that the stripes looked far more like vanilla than ‘white’.

See?

And I had this wallpaper from the time I was five or six until I was, like, fifteen. Which was wHierd now that I think of it because I only took one year of ballet, which culminated in an end-of-year 17 hour recital of which I appeared for approximately 3 minutes in a clearly trendy ice skating number requiring gobs and gobs of makeup (exciting). Oh! And also, I appeared in the finale too, where we sang the crowd favorite, It’s a Small World (Which I had to google in case the name of the song is really ‘It’s a Small, Small World’).

It isn’t.

The next year I was in gymnastics, which didn’t go very well.

Mainly because I have never been bendy.

You know, there should be an entrance exam for little kid gymnastics classes.

Because of future therapy bills, that’s why.

Anyway. Since I was in ballet class the year that my mother chose my bedroom wallpaper, I got ballerinas. Most likely she hoped that my single class at the Donna Miceli Dance Center would spawn a lifetime of ballet love.

It didn’t.

And we had no money, nor wallpaper removal skills. So there was only one way for me to get rid of that wallpaper when I was fifteen years old and self-absorbed and hating my wallpaper.

A tree had to fall on our house.

And so it did.

It was really just an enormous limb from a huge oak tree that was next to our house. And the limb fell onto the peak, causing the back wall to separate from the rest of the house, and cabinets to fall off of the walls, and – long story short – our house was totaled.

So we stayed at a neighbor’s house as my mother talked to and fought with the insurance company, who wanted to put us up in a hotel with a pool (cool!) and my mother demanded a single wide trailer to be parked next to our house while it was torn down to the studs and rebuilt with, you know, an attached back wall (not cool).

So, a month or so after we acquired our much-argued-for trailer, we were all sitting at the teeny tiny table in the teeny tiny kitchen one night, and I said to my mother, “You know, at the end of the day, this is really a good thing.” And she looked up slowly and I thought she was going to stab me in the eye with her fork. So, thinking she misunderstood me, I quickly said, “No, I mean, in the end we are getting a brand new house!”

Made perfect sense to me.

My mother and my sister clearly did not have the affinity nor desire to create cool spaces to live in. Because after I said that they both looked like they were going to stab me in the eye with their forks.

I still question whether I may have been adopted.

Or stolen.

Anyway. Without the nest creation and beautification gene, neither one of them probably suffered from CAD  (Color Affective Disorder. Duh. Keep up.) like me.

And if you suffer from CAD, I am certain that you would have comorbid conditions (I know, right? All kinds of medical right there) like Spot Aversion Disorder. And maybe…

Wait. You don’t know what that is?

Okay. So, like say you are so happy with your brand new paint job in your recently renovated inn…in say, Maine.

And so you lock up the house for the season and you come back in the spring and KAPOW!

Spots!

A freakin’ dalmatian room!

And you know what comes with freakin’ dalmatian rooms right?

Indeed.

Cruella Deville.

Translation: Bad Lisa.

I mean, I didn’t turn into Bad Lisa all at once or anything.

I had prep.

First I tried to convince myself that a few knots showing through the paint were no big deal.

Then, when I was thinking that, a little voice in my head was telling me that I had asked the painters to make sure they treated the knots before they painted. And I was three hours away in Dunstable when they painted, so when I came up everything just looked clean and painted so what did I know.

So then I felt duped.

Then I had to listen to the general contractor tell me that Maine was all about knots and that I should (should) embrace the knots.

But that wasn’t sitting well either. Mostly because he told me how I should feel (and we know that ‘should’ is one of my trigger words).

Then came more knots. And more and more and more.

In three. separate. rooms.

All of which were supposed to be vanilla-y white and not as in, “hey a dalmatian puppy is born all white and then the spots come in and how exciting is that?!”

No.

My vanilla-y white was supposed to stay, you know, VANILLA-Y WHITE!

So for seven years I have walked into these freakin’ dalmatian rooms. And, finally, this year I decided to de-dalmatian the kitchen.

So my friends Glen and Elias were up this week and they were painting dynamos. They de-knotted, they sanded. They painted it all ‘Mascarpone’ (because clearly, as with ‘vanilla’, all my white paint colors need to also be names of food items). Why did they paint and not me? Because I hate my work. Seriously. I am a very bad painter. ‘Not possible’? ‘I just need practice’? ‘Just go slow’? Ya. Heard them all. Tried them all. I’m so bad, I won’t even hire myself.

Hence, 7 years of living with the freakin’ dalmatian kitchen.

But now?

No more freakin’ dalmatian kitchen!

Wahoo!

Do you think that Spot Aversion Disorder could be a disability under this new Obamacare? We should look it up because I could get some compensation maybe.

Perhaps enough to paint the freakin’ dalmatian potting room and freakin’ dalmatian attic.

One can only dream.

Thanks for readin’

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