open letter
dear people who used to live in this house,
why do you hate me?
now i know you'll protest, "julie, we don't hate you! why, we hardly knew you. how could we possibly hate you?" you might even say, "in the brief time we basked in your incandescent presence, we felt our souls fill with warmth and loving kindness for you and all mankind."
but i must insist: you hate me.
how else can i explain what you did in that room, the room that would become my office?
i suppose i understand the impulse that made you stick glow-in-the-dark stars and moons to the ceiling — perhaps it was a room for a baby, who could thereby lie in his crib and look up to an indoor milky way instead of, you know, a ceiling.
but why did you have to put them up with double-stick tape?
and weren't the stars and moons enough? did you really have to augment them with thick blobs of glow-in-the-dark paint, globs that are impossible to efface without assiduous grinding with a power sander, painfully held above my head with aching arms? globs that then require at least two coats of toxic, fumey primer if they're not to glow through the new coat of ceiling paint?
apparently you did, because: you hate me.
(we will not speak at this point of the way you used that same paint on the bedroom wall to declare your love: i ♥ joe, you painted. but rest assured we will discuss it later.)
but you couldn't stop there. you had to twist the knife. you had to apply still more double-stick tape, to the walls this time. and just when i thought i was equal to the task, i uncovered your diabolical scheme: instead of removing the tape before the room's last paint job, you painted over it. yes, i can scrape it off with the help of several trusty single-edged razor blades. but not without taking the paper off the sheetrock at the same time.
oh, you were filled with hate and rage. shut up! i know you were.
i am a gentle person, a kind person, a person who prefers peace to strife. i do not hate, as a matter of course. but now, after spending hours on end in earnest efforts to eradicate the evidence of your seething hatred, i hate you right back.
yours loathingly,
julie
Comments
this is not the julie i know and love
Posted by: auntb | February 29, 2004 06:22 PM
Aunt B - I recognize this voice. It is the same voice that I hear as I curse the people who put up the hideous yellow print walpaper that was in our foyer. Wallpaper that our contractor discovered must have been attached with the secretions of barnacles. I just don't know if I share the same emotions towards the people who owned the house in between the paperhangers and our family.
Posted by: Alan | February 29, 2004 07:18 PM
Yes! There's a bit of the signature JAR acid I remember so fondly. Michelle and I are lucky enough to have the same glow in the dark stars on a textured ceiling. I think we will leave them for the next owner.
Posted by: Mason | March 1, 2004 09:51 PM