When my sisters were teenagers, they had pretty bizarre idea for decorating their room. One afternoon, when I was about five or six and our parents were out of the house, they clipped hundreds of pictures out of magazines and glued them to their ceiling. They completely covered the ceiling with overlapping photos taken from magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour. Our parents were furious, but what could they do?

A few years later, my sisters moved out and I inherited the room. I hated that ceiling, but my parents were old and not really motivated to remodel. So I lived with it for years. I didn't need magazines of naked women -- they were all over my ceiling. But by then they were out-of-style women with feathered hair and blue eye shadow. Friends would come over to visit and want to know why I had ads for Loreal and Maybelline all over my ceiling. I'd be mortified.

At night I would lay there forced to look at the pictures and, worse yet, read the words in the ads. "If my man can't wear English Leather, he wears nothing at all." When there are words in front of your face, you have to read them. It becomes a sort of OCD. "If I don't read the English Leather slogan nine times before I fall asleep, I do not sleep at all."

Once, I tried to clip my own pictures from magazines and glue them over the old ones. But it was an insane task. I didn't have many magazines except for Mad and Discover. And it wasn't worth the effort to cut out and paste up hundreds of pictures of Alfred E. Neuman and the Space Shuttle. I did about 1/8 of the ceiling before I gave up.

Eventually, when I got a bit older, I acquired some sheets of chip-board and screwed them to the ceiling to cover the magazine photos. This lead to even more OCD behavior, but it was much more pleasant. Every night before falling asleep, I'd look at the various patterns in the chip-board and see all kinds of images and scenes. It was kind of the white-trash equivilant of looking at constellations. "There's the guy with the huge eyes. There's the donkey. There's the Winnebago. There's the couple humping. There's Gene Simmons."

These days my bedroom ceiling has lots of glitter embedded into the textured paint. Once again, this was not my decision, and when we first moved here I thought it to be incredibly tacky. But now I sort of like it. The light from the street makes the glitter look kind of orange, like all the stars and planets have turned into Mars. It looks best in candlelight. When I look at it each night, I don't have any OCD routines. I just look.
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