First, there was Etsy. Etsy, for those of you who don't spend hours idly shopping on the Internet is like an on-line swap meet. Do you like fancy jewelry? Some one on Etsy makes a decent copy for $12. Want a personalized map of the US to show where you met your spouse? Etsy. Personalized crib art for the nursery? Personalized gold-tone necklace? Found object art? Etsy is your place. Thousands of purveyors of tchatchkes hawk their wares on Etsy. Knit beanies that look like a Yoda head for your cat to wear? You can find it at Etsy.
It seems impossible, but there's something worse than Etsy. It's like a DIY Etsy. You don't purchase the finished projects that you see in the pictures on Pinterest. No, no. You get a photo-link to a site that gives you directions to make your own tchatchkes. The pattern to knit your own Boba Fett dog costume.
Pinterest is killing me.
Pinterest is EVIL.
Ostensibly, the site is an endless (literally?) resource of ideas for everything from improving your vacation photos (Sort! Label! Print! Organize! Display!) to renovating your bathroom. There are ideas for refinishing furniture and polishing silver. You can reclaim junk as art and repurpose it all in your house.
If you don't know about Pinterest, consider yourself lucky. It's a visual site that absolutely sucks time from your life. It's like you and Alice fell through the rabbit hole together. She followed the rabbit, to go see Wonderland and you got roped into looking at the computer screen version of Wonderland.
The screen shows you everything that is possible in our world--marble showers, cascading carpets of green lawn, bountiful home gardens in perfect, tidy, weedless rows. Impossibly adorable photographs of children, bright eyed and happy, rather than teary and red-nosed. There are bathrooms with open air showers, bedrooms with expansive views of turquoise seas. Children's rooms that look like toy shops.
Are you not looking to live in a fairy-tale castle? Then you can find more mundane organization for the shit you already have. Do you need rolling shelves under your stairway? Perhaps your junk drawer needs to be reclaimed from the twine that has unraveled in there and snagged everything in it. Do you need a super creative way to store Legos on your child's wall? Do you have a spare bookshelf that you can convert into a mega-storage for whatever piles of crap you've accumulated?
Perhaps your house is already fairy-tale ready and you are OCD organized to the ears. Then you can use Pinterest to find workouts to make your upper arms smaller. Or your waist flatter. Or your saddlebags slimmer. Do you need a smoothie after your workout? Soothing cucumber? Healthy ginger? Pinterest has a recipe to juice every vegetable known to man. Maybe you want some liquid kale?
Fairy tale house? Check. OCD? Check. Resemble an anorexic mannequin? Check. Then YOU need to look through Pinterest's collection of home remedies and tinctures. Red cheeks? Make this paste featuring coconut oil. Or this salve with crushed bananas. Some rural Amazonian tribe looks forever 25 using just just one ingredient in all their foods--find it. Use items in your pantry to make foot scrubs, hand scrubs, and magically dissolve scars.
There is literally something for every single body on Pinterest. Classroom ideas (a reading nook is no longer good enough. A palm-tree tropical oasis with books is possible). Gift wrapping ideas (You didn't even know that a gift in paper with a tag wasn't cute). Garden ideas. How to keep a proper family calendar (writing things on the back of an envelope is so 1997). How to dry herbs from your immaculate herb garden (You just do not have enough heirloom basil). How to turn a pail into a chandelier (in case you live in a barn). Make an end table from a bench. Or, a bench from a table.
Have an extra ladder laying around? Turn it into art and hang it in your family room. Decoupage family photos onto a dresser. Spray paint virtually anything into a brighter version of whatever it was. Make slip covers to conceal your shitty furniture, turn dishes you don't use into art. Learn how to adopt and care for a micro-pig. Spray paint a found cow skull.
Want a new tattoo or haircut? Pages upon pages of ideas for colors, shapes, images. Tattoos that are gallery-quality, if only you can find an artist to reproduce the Pinterest (possibly photoshopped) image. Hair cuts in every shape and color, ombre dyes and neons.
Transform a nutritional nightmare food from your fave restaurant chain into a low-cal, home made crock pot version. Low cal ranch dressing from yogurt (blech) or a fat free no-pan egg frittata.
It seems to never end. The options are limitless, the ideas unfettered by any sort of reality about your own talents. Do you have hours and hours and free laborers? Do you have seemingly bottomless closets to store all this crap? Do you live in a museum? Does your child hate cupcakes made from the Betty Crocker mix?
Pinterest, despite your convictions to the contrary, cannot improve your life. All Pinterest can do is make you feel inadequate about your non-subway-tiled master bathroom, your grandma's recipe for full-fat non-eggplant lasagna, your scrappy garden with the bald spot in your lawn. Your roses are not hand washed with dish soap to get rid of mites. Your hand cream is not lavender scented with the lavender you grew in your own hanging herb garden. You do not have time to make your own lip gloss.
What is happening? Is there a certain demographic in this country who is walking around saying, "Alas, I have so much free time, and I disdain brand name products, so I will prepare my own line of bath toiletries?"
Who are these people? Are we devolving? Like suddenly we're back in 1840 and we need to churn our own butter? The reason we have butter for sale in the grocery store is that people figured out they could exchange a product/monetary value for another product/service. This is how we developed, you know, an economy. We don't need to be self sufficient in addition to working, raising children, trying to be good spouses, partners and people. We don't need to adopt pet projects to be useful. There is no need to repurpose a 1950s melamine tray into a magnetized "To-Do Board" because, and I cannot stress this enough--if you have time to do that, you OBVIOUSLY do not need a To-Do Board. Because you clearly DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH TO DO.
Pinterest doesn't make our lives better. It highlights the things we don't have. It shows us the perfect yards (groomed to within an inch of their lives) or the ideal way to store your spices, or the perfect way to make your kids get along (the getalong shirt. Are you kidding?) Pinterest breeds dissatisfaction and longing. It gives us unreasonable expectations of our own abilities. Is that kitchen in the photo gorgeous? Of course it is. Is it feasible for your modest budget on your kitchen redo? Of course not. Pinterest highlights a thousand insignificant things that you are doing incorrectly. If you need to feel inadequate, Pinterest is the place to go to dissolve your self esteem in a easy-to-whip-up mixture of vinegar and baking soda.
The American desire to acquire. Even if you refurbish, repaint, reclaim--it may not be new, but you still have more. You can go to Target and buy a new, one-of-a-million mirror for $20 or you can go into your yard and spray paint twigs and moss to make your own "rustic" one-of-a-kind mirror.
It's still a shitty mirror.
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