It’s hard to hate whimsy. There simply isn’t enough there. Go ahead, hate poverty, smoking or Christmas. All three of those things have weight. They call for extreme emotions. But whimsy? There’s nothing there. It’s a breeze. A puff. A piece of lint.
But, whimsy. I hate whimsy.
Although, apparently not entirely because I bought these knobs for the cabinetry in my laundry room.
Very whimsical, don’t you think?
But, anyway, back to the hate.
I used to think that refusing to dance in fields with floral skirts and finger cymbals made me a nut. I mean, I love a good Earth Day celebration, but inevitably people would pull out the mandolins and drums and start spinning in circles. That’s usually when I grab my family in search of a plate of gluten free beans. My daughter resists. She’d wear floral skirts and finger cymbals until the cows came home, but she is one against three and eventually joins us without much complaining.
She likes us. We make her laugh, even if she is a butterfly living among a family of more practical raccoons.
I used to work on design shows and watched a lot of designers add pieces to a room for a touch of whimsy. It was like a code for doesn’t match at all. But what do I know? I wasn’t a designer. I was a producer and producers aren’t whimsical.
There’s a lot of whimsical stuff in the world, including my sock knobs in the laundry room, but there is one act of whimsy that trumps everything.
Swimming in fountains.
It looks fun, doesn’t it? I’m sure that once a day, somewhere in TV land, groups of people are portrayed joyfully swimming in a fountain. Of course there is the opening to Friends, which still reruns, somewhere, everywhere, I’m sure. But there are others. Fountains I’ve never heard of. Fountains I’ll never see. And fountain splashing that I’ve seen far too many times.
It’s all fun while the swimmers are in the fountains, but when the get out? And they are wet and cold and they don’t have anywhere to change or anything to change into because they illegally jumped into dirty water on a whim.
I don’t know. It’s just not for me.
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