Sometimes I hear people talk about the things they used to believe as kids, and I’m like… that’s it? Oh, your brother once told you that Americans lived on the moon, and you believed it for a whole year? You once thought that spaghetti was the hair of defeated monsters – until you were seven?
Big deal! My awful parents actually had fun teaching me the wrong things. They’d tell me that Ireland was ruled by intelligent horses, that becoming Prime Minister means you literally turn into the sun, and that renovations to the house meant that the room had literally shifted into another dimension. And so, SO much more. They let me believe it until I was an adul
t, and now I’m still psychologically traumatised!
The renovations thing freaked me out, so now that I’m actually grown up and looking for some laundry room renovations, I’m feeling a little bit nervous. I’m here, I have the home of my dreams (sort of), and the only thing it really needs is a jolt of style in the laundry. Currently it’s been neglected, so much so that the estate agent actually tried to hide it from me. I didn’t mind, though; it’s a fixer-upper. It’s not like it’s that hard to hire laundry designers, within Melbourne of all places. I was far more nervous about the agent, since Mum and Dad told me when I was younger that moving home was not a matter of choice. At any time, estate agents could burst in through the window, ninja-style, kidnap your whole family and take them to a new home, and you couldn’t complain because the government told them to do it.
I’m about… 90% sure that isn’t true? Let’s say 88%. But now that it’s come time for renovations, I’m even more nervous. What if I’m actually warping away the old room into another dimension? I guess that’s fine, but my parents very sincerely told me that sometimes the renovators leave gaps, and you could get sucked into them and end up in a parallel world where people write in red pen and all chocolate is deadly poison.
-Chen