I am the Gandhi of Pinterest.
If you follow me, you will see that I pin absolutely nothing, and I appear to be fasting as an act of civil disobedience. That is not it, exactly. I was afraid of pinning at first, feeling sure that if some criminal out there could piece together the common threads of all of my “favorite things,” he would somehow deduce my bank passwords, secret questions, and where I keep the spare house key. I thought I had pinned nothing at all, but then I looked on my profile, and I saw a host of bizarre items that I had indiscriminately “liked” with my wayward thumb while scrolling. It was a betrayal. I do not like any of these things! (Don’t, I repeat, don’t surprise me with these items for my birthday. It would be a sad surprise.)
Look, I may not have been pinning, but I have been trying several of the projects I have seen on Pinterest. Maybe I still hesitate to pin because I am stunned into paralysis by too many questions.
If I start pinning on Pinterest:
1. Will I have to keep wooden palettes on hand? Because I have no idea where all these crafters are getting theirs. The only time I ever owned a set of wooden palettes was for ten minutes when a semi-tractor-trailer delivered hardwood flooring to my house, but the driver never asked me if I wanted to save the palettes to build a home theater; he just drove away with them. Should I be mad? Were these mine?
2. Will I have to touch that space-age slime inside of glow-sticks? Isn’t that stuff toxic? Didn’t I hear that once? I am not into hazardous materials, generally speaking. Do I have to start pouring that crud into balloons (not what I call safely contained) and floating them in the pool? Do I have to add carcinogens to federally-approved playtoys? Because I am thinking that it might not be a good idea to blow cancer bubbles at the children.
3. Will I always get sad surprises? Like when I thought I was making the Wreath of Summer, but it turned out to be the …
4. If I start pinning on Pinterest, will I have to make my own candy? See, I usually buy Twix and Jolly Ranchers lollipops at Walgreen’s for cheap. It only takes three minutes, and I don’t have to clean up the kitchen after. I don’t think I am going to have time to go reinventing all of these wheels. I’m fine that Mars and Willy Wonka did it for me. Anyway, what’s next after the candy? Will I have to make my own ketchup? Because I like living in America, where I don’t have to do very much.
5. Will I have to grow out my hair? I have very short hair, and if I made a video of all the different ways I do my hair, it would last two seconds. Not every fancy hairdo looks fancy on everybody. I saw a lady at the store the other day with a sideways French braid that she had done herself — with hair that wasn’t long enough to stay tucked and without a mirror, clearly. For a second, I thought there was a cotton-mouth snake on the back of her head. I almost ran up to her, yelling, “Unpin it, lady! Unpin it!”
6. Will I ever find Ryan Gosling saying what I want him to say? Which is this:
7. If I start pinning on Pinterest, will I sound like a trained seal barking for fishy-fish snacks? Love! Want! Need! Please! I don’t know about this. Because I like old-fashioned things: like sentences.
8. Will I have to host a lot of terrific themed get togethers with cool party favors? I’m always some variation of tired. I don’t think I can come up with the energy to host a party, much less send the guests home with anything other than a box of Tic-Tacs. I don’t even have the energy to worry about whether all of my friends are having terrific themed get togethers and are not inviting me.
9. Wait, are you not inviting me?
10. If I start pinning on Pinterest, will I have to have a child and then complete seventeen lists of 101 wonderful things to do with him or her? Hey, instead of taking the time to pin all of those heartwarming lists, shouldn’t I be spending time with the actual kid? I’d hate to make him wait around until I got off my phone.
11. Will I have to pin an intense workout immediately followed by a four-inch deep piece of pie? Or vice versa? And if I pin Paula Deen, then pin Bob Harper, do they cancel one another out like light beams in a physics experiment, so that I’ve really pinned nothing at all? If Bob Harper falls in a forest and no one hears him scream, did he really fall?
12. Will my house always smell like hot vinegar and melted plastic? And if I use the hot vinegar to clean my bathroom tiles, then what do I use to clean out this urinal smell that is now in my microwave?
13. Will I have to eat the month’s-worth of make-ahead Crock Pot frozen meals that I am never in the mood for and that now have freezer burn?
14. Will I have to become a kinda-creepy, super-organized teacher with an eerie ghost town classroom? I keep looking for the evidence of real students in these strange photographs. Has a human child ever walked on the surface of that moon? And when the kids do arrive, and when they wreck the color-coordinated scheme — which they will, as we know — how will these teacher-robots keep from going berserk? Yeah, that’s what I want to read; pin something about that.
15. If I start pinning on Pinterest, will I have to use that other Clean House workflow chart, because I never get very far on that one. I’ve tried to complete it several times, but I’m pretty much 0 for 10. Can we all agree that this new one is much more realistic? I am comfortable with the pace of this one, aren’t you? Yes, I can check off every item on this list every Saturday. No problem.
Whew! Now I feel better; I think I am ready to pin for the first time.
Everybody pin something great so that I can repin it. Ready? Go.
But please try to remember that I don’t have any wooden palettes.