Well... Mom and Dad bought me a trailer to live in. I am somehow very, very nomadic, so nomadic that having a trailer bedroom seems permanent. Weird, right? But I have had 3 bedrooms at Willow house (we bought it I think in 2006), and I of course move every 3-9 months in Santa Cruz... so a space that will not be rented to anyone or used by anyone is a novelty. Of course, Nicholas has taken to sleeping in it... I probably will take to shooting trespassers, in true trailer fashion... Nate has an airsoft gun I can probably borrow.

I have not even seen the trailer. It is a 20 foot 1971 Prowler trailer, and it cost 1,000 dollars. It has a kitchen, a bathroom, and 3 bed areas, and it is 8 feet wide. I kind of don't know how I feel about it. I know it will be a fun project, and everything, and when I lived in a mobile home last summer (they are a bit bigger and less portable than a proper trailer) it was very nice, except during the afternoon on hot days. I have some sheer purple curtains and a green throw for it... it will be quite easy for me to do a trailer/india theme for it, bc I own some neat textiles... based on the photos of other prowler trailers' interiors online, though, that is not really something I want to do. I kind of want to bc it does not require buying supplies, and it is fast. But on the other hand, I get to make a Caitlan Pod.

Okay. Here is a little diversion: I feel a little anxious, irrationally or rationally unsafe, rather a lot of the time. One of the ways I fall asleep after having a panic attack is to think about what ifI had a tiny Caitlan Pod and no one could find it or knock on the door or anything. Sometimes the Caitlan Pod is like a transparent underwater coffin, sometimes it is like my bed but has got an impermeable hatch made of white metal. The first pod I remember visualizing to fall asleep was a clear plastic backpack I had in the third grade. I would imagine that someone put me safely in the backpack, and went all around, skiing I think it was, and I just didn't have to do anything and was safe.

So having an actual Pod will be really weird, but neat. But also weird because I would like to live in the house like a regular person. But that is irrelevant to the question of how to decorate. I am going to paint it! Right now I am thinking white, icy soft gray, and lilac. I have a big dinosaur painting that is black and white, so it kind of has to match that. I don't know whether the interior is subdivided at all. If the bed space is seperate than I think I want it hot pink and white. That will look good with all of the sheets I have, also I really like those colors. I don;t think the sheer purple curtains I have will be useful at all, but we'll see. I also want to use my neat green long curtain from cost plus world market, but it is really too flowy for my style right now. When I moved here in fall it was great, but now I like glossier, harder forms.

Now, I know this is confusing, but I don't have any pictures of the trailer, so this is a picture of the same brand of trailer but made 15 years later, that I found on google.


It's a good thing I'm tiny. Mom says mine has dark wood, and there is no way I am keeping that. Dark wood, in an 8 foot wide trailer? Who designs these things? I will use paint, or contact paper, or whatever the space requires... I think lilac trim, pale gray walls, and white ceilings. And in the bed space that I will use as a bed space (there are 3, one of which had better be big enough for my twin mattress) I am thinking 4 inch wide vertical stripes in pink and white along the back wall (maybe I will swatch pink and gray as well, that sounds fun), or whatever wall is most visible from the rest of the trailer, then white walls with a fat pink border around all the sides on whatever other walls there are. And ultimately, heat sensitive tiles for the shower, and moss in square bowls, because apparently those are the only things about my gypsy caravan that I actually want in my real life touring caravan (that is what it is called in england, and it actually bothers me when Californians use England-only words for things there is a local word for, but I am going to say touring caravan because it has got the word caravan in it.).

I mean, it is a trailer. There is a bit of an aversion to living in a trailer, because of television skits about trailer trash, and television footage of trailer parks being destroyed, and kind of the astrodome/trailers/disaster housing thing, but I worked through the bit of aversion that had worked its way into my subconscious. I had to work through it, when I lived in a trailer from April to September of 2008. (it helped that it was a phenomenally interesting and engaging art piece, filled with decades of little visual jokes, and sculptural "repairs", and bottle cap and glass mosaics. Here is the artist/owner's gallery, which I don't think the trailer is in at all, but it gives a sense of the style and technique.)

Okay. I have all my winter clothes and 2 suitcases of books to load into the car and head out.

*when we moved in in 2006 i had one bedroom... when we got it fixed up enough to rent I moved into a different bedroom... when i went to college my parents rented our old unit and moved to the upstairs one, so i had no bedroom.. they gave me the mother in law unit downstairs, then gave it to nicholas, so I again have no bedroom. Some of the proposals were: loft in the office (this is where i sleep when i am home, and generally the whole family has popped in about 3 times each by the time I get up... it is not a private space), yurt in the yard, earth shed in the yard, borrowed trailer, plywood in the attic.