I want to paint my room this week, so today I went to the hardware store and got gads of paint chips in every shade of blue possible. Then I walked to the Target next door, where my sister was looking for shorts. As this is an hour-long search at the minimum, I sat down to look at the cards of blue squares.

Oh, I love paint chips. I love them. One of the cooler parts of teaching myself HTML was getting to play with tables of hexidecimal color combinations, which are very pretty indeed. They look like they've got every color ever invented, don't they? But the problem with those is that when you go to look for a color you've got in your head, it's rarely there. And that's why I love paint chips: they really do come in every color you can think of. Well, probably not the more screaming shades of neon pink, because most people would go mad if they painted their walls that color, but all the nice colors. I love the names of the various blues I picked up. The Ralph Lauren ones are stupid (isn't that a clothes manufacturer? Why on earth are they making paint?) because they try to be all trendy with the names - "Ona Beach" and such. But I love the others - "Medici blue", "Epic Blue", "Harbor Blue".

After a while of staring at the shades, trying to work out which ones wouldn't make my room look gloomy, I went into a sort of paint chip trance, lost in the names and subtle shades of the color. "Flyaway Blue" is a little greyer than the sky. "Sea nymph blue" is so light it's almost white. "Shipside" is the color the sea ought to be, but isn't. "Celtic Blue" is darker, more slate colored. "Renewal" is dreamy and very pale. "Planetarium" is almost turquoise, the color of the sky when it's just starting to get dark. And after enough of this, I got to staring into the paint chips and ended up lost in the blue, each shade transporting me to a different bit of sea or sky. "Windswept." "Azure Afternoon." "Ice Age." "Whirlpool." "Cosmos." "Sailor's Dream." "Blue Bayou." "Tailwind." "Aloft." "Wild Blue Yonder." I was wandering somewhere in "Horizons" when my sister showed up, laden with newly-bought picture frames she wanted me to hold while she tried on a pair of shorts. There's probably a metaphor in there somewhere about the individual versus society, but I also think it goes to show why sitting on the base of a clothing display in Target looking at paint chips isn't always a good idea.

June 23
July 2