Painting my Ceiling

White walls, cracked and fading, and not really white anymore. Barely covered by a scattering of posters, unlike most rooms belonging to people my age. I've always meant to paint them. I should be able to find a color that works with the rest of the room fairly easily, because my room has been becoming steadily more blue over the past several years.

In fact, most of my life has been becoming steadily more blue over the last several years, until people think blue is my color. There was a point when that would have bothered me a lot. Blue is a nothing-color, meaningless. Everyone likes it, no one feels strongly about it. Blue jeans say nothing about the fashion-tastes of the person wearing them.

But, I've been realizing, blue isn't as meaningless as it seems. It takes on meaning from the context it is put in more easily than other colors, in fact. There are shades of it, of course, more red, more yellow. I tend to lean towards the red-gray blues, myself, and the dark ones. I've discovered I don't mind wearing blue, since I've now acquired three blue gowns, and one blue summer dress, a blue wool coat, a blue wool cloak, a blue tie. It's gotten to the point where most of my favorite clothing (with the exception of pants) is blue. And I guess I don't mind that anymore. So I know what color I'm going to paint my walls, as soon as I get around to doing that.

And it's not a problem to paint the walls themselves, other than the issues with moving the furniture. The problem is my ceiling.

My ceiling has more cracks in its paint than any part of my walls. It's dirty, and almost looks water-stained in places. It's also covered in hundreds, possibly thousands, of glow in the dark stars. They aren't the big plastic ones, clumsily held on with putty, for the most part. They're tiny, flat stickers, many of them not even "star-shaped" and covering about ten square feet, not counting the ones that spill onto the wall next to my bed. They're as closely grouped as the stars one can see on a clear night in the country. Once removed, they'll lose their stickiness and be nigh-impossible to store. Even if they didn't, it'd probably be a full day's work to replace them. I can't paint around them. And if my ceiling isn't off-white anymore, they'll be visible during daytime. But my ceiling needs painting, nonetheless.

I guess I should come to terms with the fact that I'll never have a night sky on my ceiling again, and start taking them down. But I don't know how to do that. I don't remember when I put the first packet of 200 up. I'm quite sure it was a packet of 200, because it's always a packet of 200. I have half of one lying on my floor someplace waiting for me to put it up. And I guess that's the answer. I can start over, with what I have left, and with more that I'll buy over the last little bit of time before I leave for college. It may be a while before I start painting, so I'll enjoy my stars while I can, and get used to the idea of no longer having them.

And now I'm ready to start getting my room ready to paint.