It’s raining here, and I’m at my desk staring out at it from my little alcove in my little gabled attic/studio. I think it could fall under the classification of “garret” if I was living in it. There are kitties running around, batting balls. Every once and a while, they stop playing and come up on my desk and stare at my typing. I would describe the scene as being serene.

I’ll always remember, when I was about 16 I was a semi-finalist in an Ikea design contest. It was for teenagers to design their dream room, and I knew how to rock an application (instead of just describing my dream room, I drew it).

BUT.

But.

At the meet and greet where they decided on the 4 finalists who got to design a room and have it sit in the store (they each would win 500 dollars – the ultimate winner won the contents of the room and 1000 dollars, or something like that) there was this girl.

She kept going on and on about how she wanted to be an artist living in a garret in Paris at the turn of the century, and how her room was based on that.

Vomit.

I mean, yeah we’ve all seen an American in Paris, we’ve all seen Amelie. We get it, you’re sixteen, you want to be Van Gogh (without the icky ear cutting thing), you’ve got a poster of Sunflowers on your wall, whoopedeedoo for you.

Imagine Rory Gilmore, but where Rory is sweet and smart, This girl was insufferable and precocious.

Where I wanted to actually do creative things to the room like paint the furniture bright colours, she wanted to stick an easel in it (I can’t sum it up any better than that).

And of course she got chosen as a finalist.

And of course the room was ugly, bare and unimaginative when we went to see it.

But she impressed the judges spouting her prep school, bourgeois pretensions.

Thankfully, she’s probably living in the suburbs somewhere working as an account, or at best some faux loft, while I actually am an artist who’s got her own garret (if not in Paris – sigh – although I will go there someday with the boy I love, and it will be all the more wonderful since it won’t just be a high school field trip).

Funny how things work out.