While growing up in my parents’ house, I wasn’t allowed to put anything on the walls. No posters or pictures or anything. This killed the little gay interior designer in me. To make matters worse, the walls were painted grey and the furniture was this tacky 90’s green marble-ized plastic custom-made fixture stuff. I was always jealous of my friend Jonathan’s bedroom because his room was so nice and his mom was an interior designer so she knew what she was doing.
When I moved to Boston, it was the first time I was going to be living on my own without any family or roommates. I didn’t have to follow any rules or make compromises. If I wanted, I could paint the walls any ridiculous color. If I wanted, I could move the furniture around every day for a month until I was happy with the final result. If I wanted, I could wake up in the middle of the night and decide that the bookshelf would be better in the bedroom than the living room and proceed to make the change that night.
Unfortunately, one of my other traits comes into play during my adventures in interior design, and that would be my inability to make simple decisions (or that’s how people qualify my desire to make informed simple decisions). Before I moved, my mom helped me pick out some furniture for the living room. We went to a few stores and there were some pieces that I liked, but I explained to her that I wasn’t ready to settle because I didn’t want to pick something and then stumble upon something I liked better a week later. Obviously this drove her crazy. Similarly, when I ready to paint my walls, it took me three trips to Home Depot to finally settle on the colors for the living room and bedroom. Luckily, I didn’t have anyone to annoy with this painting crisis.
When I did purchase that paint, one of my most vivid memories of my first year of law school was painting the apartment during that first month of classes. This was back when I was compelled to read every little thing that was assigned to us (and now I know better), so I would come home tired from class, paint for hours, and then by 9 or so I would scream to myself, “YOU NEED TO STOP THIS AND READ OR YOU’RE GONNA FAIL.” So I would drop everything and attempt to finish everything for the next’s day’s class while covered in paint and with all the furniture clumped together in the middle of the room.
While I am excited to move back to New York, I do have to say that I am painfully going to miss this apartment. If I could, I would tie a rope around it, attach it to a plane, fly it down to New York, and plop it on a building.
This brings us to “Push the Button” by Sugababes. The only reason the previous story reminds me of this song is because the music video centers around elevators or something (a la “You’re Making Me High” by Toni Braxton — and jeez, that video is a WHOLE OTHER conversation)… anyways, everyone loves to comment on the dinging of the bell at every floor in the elevator to my apartment. I’m really stretching the connection here.
So yeah, this song was my introduction to amazing British pop. From Sugababes, I eventually moved onto Girls Aloud… Rachel Stevens… Lily Allen… Winehouse… Kate Nash… Adele.. Duffy… on and on and on (most of which we’ll be discussing at some point, don’t you worry). It’s always interesting to me what picks up in America and what doesn’t, but I am a huge fan of checking out what’s going on in the U.K. iTunes whenever I get the chance. With regard to Sugababes, they are essentially the British Destiny’s Child with a revolving door of girls but without the controlling father/manager. Check out “Hole in the Head” and “About You Now”… two of my FAVES.
