The Tyranny of the Standard Depth
The tape measure screams back into its casing with a violence that makes 7 people in the nearby faucet aisle jump. Karen is standing in the center of the big-box showroom, her knuckles white, staring at a slab of ‘Standard Gray’ laminate that represents everything wrong with the last 67 years of domestic architecture. The sales associate is already tapping his stylus against his tablet. He has 17 minutes until his next appointment, and Karen is currently hallucinating about a rolling pin.
I’m thinking about this because I just spent the last 27 minutes extracting a cedar splinter from my thumb with a pair of dull tweezers. It was a microscopic thing, barely 7 millimeters long, yet it dictated my entire reality. I couldn’t type, I couldn’t hold a coffee mug, and I certainly couldn’t find ‘zen.’ It’s the small, sharp intrusions that reveal the truth about our environments. We ignore the splinter until the infection of indifference sets in.
The Invisible Labor of Compromise
We are currently living through