I should be grateful. I am not in a psyche ward. I am not in Prison. And I'm not Celebrating the Joy of Being a Woman! I'm just in the beginning of a three day heat wave and it's midnight. The fan is blowing and the chimes are tinkling. How lovely. But one of my neighbours is playing some music that they also think is just lovely.

Now, if anyone has recently come across this blog, ya may need to know that I am fiercely touchy when it comes to sound and music. Whilst I love a lot of music, some it might be considered Most Likely To Send Their Child To The Dark Side of Satan by a select few Concerned Citizens. I have bitched about the crap that they Torture Us with in the Supermarkets. (Ah, The Noises Of The City. 4/21/08).
I happen to have a deep love of classical music, which the neighbours are playing.

But this particular kind of classical music riles me for some reason. They play it frequently at my favourite used book store too, which makes it hard for me to concentrate. Strangely, that music is featured in the waiting rooms of both my therapist and psychologist, which is disturbing. It speaks to people of a certain ilk and tribe to which I do not belong. It is swelling, energetic and triumphant for no apparent reason. I don't feel as if I am guided to an emotional catharsis. There seems to be no "story". Often in classical music, one feels at least stirred, or a hint that this is touching something within that is ageless. But this music leaves me at best irritated.

What's also odd tonight, is that their musical selection is mixed with a singer that at first I thought might be Streisand, but Cricket suggested could be Celine. Is it me, or is this truly weird? Could this be them battling it out over the record player, one playing the classical, the other the diva? Is this a musical that I have happily avoided these forty-two years? Either way, I realize I need to buy new speaker wire. My speakers blew out a while ago and I thought, well, it's not like you want to blow away your neighbours with the Bose speakers and My Taste. I am reconsidering.

"Henry" and his wife "Ellen" are delightful neighbours. They are my parents' age and their house shows the years of work that they have poured into it. Tasteful with a capital "T", with strange mishaps that Cricket and I as artists notice. For example, they have two of the exact same print in the hallway. Why? Because they match the extraordinary wallpaper that Ellen chose some years ago, which involves Flamingos or flowers or some such. She's basically a William and Morris/Home and Garden/Architectural Design/Classical person who has just discovered Feng Shuie. Or however you spell it.

The problem for Ellen, as I see it, is that she's trying to catch the latest fad, rather than trusting her instinct. They just re-did their kitchen and she was all about the granite counters, saying how much value they add to the house. But they still has to live there! I paint a fair amount of interiors and am happy to do free consultations, unlike a lot of house-painters. I coach a lot of people to get beyond basic white, but I don't want anyone living with something that they're unhappy with.

We look at family treasures, flip through "dream living spaces" from media, look at their art, furniture, materials etc. I make up 24" X 30" actual paint swatches, because computer generated colours do not reflect how actual paint does, of four colours for them to look at. Then we blue tape them to the walls, to look at them in different lights, and go back and make more colours if need be.

I have a fabulous client right now, "Zoe". What's great about Zoe is that she's open to discussion: knows her own, but is open to suggestion. Her place is enourmous, so we tackled her office first. "What colour do you think would make me relaxed?" she asked me. "I find greens to be very peaceful." I tried. "Orange is my screen-saver," she countered. Zoe also has a degree in Ancient Greek and Roman god-wot. She showed me a photo of dig she'd been on where they'd discovered a mural of some unknown religion, possibly phallic, in full panorama. This is a wonderful woman. She has seen colour. She also said to me many times that she does not understand colour.

Looking at her experience, I took the space she had to work with (an attic, with cedar bead-boards and over-hanging "jaws". For the first colour choices I gave her an orange to match her screen-saver, a terra-cotta, a pale peach (for the jaws) and another in the orange family. The terra-cotta and pale peach won. Then she thought that she might like a Mediterranean blue for the trim. This was tough, because she had been in Italy, and I had been in France. I threw up a couple of blues, but then I had an inspiration. Lying in bed one night, I remembered an "Oops" paint that I'd bought. So I put that up too. She loved it and thought I was a colour genious! The colour? It's an odd one. If you put brown by it, it looks green. If you put green by it, it looks brown.

The concert from next door has stopped, so now the radio that plays constantly in my head has started. For some reason, it only plays bad music that it's heard at the supermarkets! When I "hear" music outside my head, it's always great. Arias, classical, sometimes a band, but never bad and always something I've never heard before. One of the gifts of my mental illness.