Perfection - a rant

I've been reading Kathleen Gilles Seidel's new book, Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige, which is partly about the changes in family dynamics that come with marriage and divorce and partly about perfectionism/competition between women to prove who's most deserving.  The thing is, the affluent lifestyle of the characters in this book is making me feel a bit like my lifestyle doesn't measure up.  I found this to be true as well with her last book, A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity.  It's not just that these people have more money than I will likely ever have, it's that they're all on the career fast track and they're lives are packed full of enrichment activities.  And they all have great skills and talents.  

My life just does not measure up, I'm feeling.  Ironic, isn't it, that I'm getting this feeling from a book that's about how pointless competition is between women?  I think her earlier books were a little more accessible for the common folk like me. 

In any case, today I was hanging out my laundry on the line and thinking about this.  I really like hanging out my laundry.  I feel like I'm saving money (and the Earth!) and while I'm doing it, I go into sort of a zen state, stooping and gathering and hanging and pinning and stooping again.  Yet there are some places, some higher-brow neighborhoods than mine, where laundry lines aren't even allowed (!) as they are not considered "aesthetic" enough.  (Did you know there is even a Right to Dry movement?)

So I'm pinning and my mind begins to flow into a mental rant about how "nice" everything has to be now.  Everything has to match and it all has to be brand new and brand specific.  Your living room has to have sofa sets (or antiques and tasteful original art), the walls have to be painted with a color coordinated with the dining room.  The sheets on the bed have to be match the duvet color and the pillowcases and the throws.  And it's better if all that matches the towels in the adjoining bath.  The yard has to be landscaped.  Planting flowers in pots or window boxes and maintaining the bushes in the front yard doesn't cut it anymore.   The seats in the car have to be leather.  As do your shoes - Italian leather. 

Like all cheap underachievers out there, I have to say I find all of this annoying.  Not that there shouldn't be beauty, but that there's the expectation that everyon else has to keep up.   My grandparents' house - I remember it fondly - had nothing that matched.  The sofas were made of naugahyde, the kind that left a pattern on the backs of your legs when you stood up.  The pictures had been acquired one at a time, mostly via gifting.  There was this cool plant holder made of little fruit beads - cherries, apples, pears, bananas.  I thought it was beautiful.  There were also fruit magnets on the fridge, but they didn't really match.  (My grandfather was a fruit farmer, so fruit was kind of the "unifying motif" in as much as there was a unifying motif - which there wasn't, really.)  The beds were old, but not antique.  The ones in the bedroom my sister and I used were metal, and they bounced something fierce when you jumped on them.  The homemade bookcase upstairs kept you from falling to your death down the steep steps, and it was filled with an old jumble of books no one read.  And flannel graph materials for a variety of Bible stories.  The bathroom downstairs smelled like Rose Milk.  I loved that house.   You could really play there, and no one had an anxiety attack about the carpet or the upholstery.  

Any magazine or home decor show today would mock the crap out of their house, but I thought it was homey and welcoming.   My grandparents played dominoes and UNO with us at the kitchen table and popped popcorn on the stove there, in that kitchen with the metal cabinets.  I don't necessarily want the same decor for my house today, but I want the freedom to choose stuff I like (and can afford) and not worry if it's fashionably correct or goes exactly with the carpet.  I want my home to be homey, to seem like real people live here, not superpeople who naturally repel grease, dirt, and tacky knick-knackery with their powers.

I don't care if my lawn has perfect grass, I don't mind driving an old car, and I don't want to keep up with the Joneses, in either careers or acquisitions.  I like hanging my underwear and towels out on the line.  It's homey.  I just wish that were okay today.  The pressure is getting to me.