I look around my room and see accents of colors amongst the muted tones I usually prefer to decorate my room in. My bedspread is a very pale blue-gray, the furniture I brought from home brown and white. I don't really see any pink in my room. I don't see magenta or baby pink or floral colors involving every shade of pink, yet I feel as if I'm expected to love pink. I have nothing against pink, it's a perfectly nice color, but I wouldn't pick a pink shirt over another color except for maybe olive green, and I certainly wouldn't want to decorate my room in pink. Pink is one of many things I feel I'm supposed to identify with as a girl attending Andover. I have shirts from sports teams and dorms that always have pink on them. The senior girls pinnies many girls have ordered for the spring are bright pink. Of course, girls are expected to identify with pink across the globe, but something about living in a dorm emphasizes for me all the things I'm expected to be as a girl. My room is decorated with scarves, flags, and a map of Maine. People come in my room, and remark on how sparse it is. They wonder how I can live in a room so bereft of color and wall hangings. In fact, my map of Maine brings me more comfort than I could ever get from an extra stuffed animal or posters of dreamy boys all over my wall. The happiest times of my young life took place in Maine last year during my year away from Andover, and I feel warmed by the site of the tiny little Chewonki campus on the broad expanse that is the coast of Maine. The flag of the bahamas I have hanging above my bed reminds me of Island School and all the peace I found there, but I feel as if my room is viewed as a sparse and cold place for its lack of fuzzy, furry or heavily muscled things. My friends who remark on my sparsely or inadequately decorated room have pictures of bunnies and models posing amongst balloons and posters of Twilight characters on their walls. Some of them have cards from their parents and boyfriends and one has a James Dean poster, but in general when I go into their rooms I'm confronted by lots and lots of random things. Many of the things mean nothing, some random bunny in an advertisement for ice cream doesn't mean anything. James Dean could hardly mean something to us as we weren't even alive for his career, fame, and life. A lot of their bed spreads are pink and green, and an abundance of pillows can be found heaped on the beds. I had an allergy attack sitting on one of their beds, as the pillows were stuffed with some kind of weird pillow stuffing, and my friend said that that happened to her often. I asked why she left all the pillows on there, and she said because they were comfy and they looked nice. Im perplexed by this desire to openly show ones ability to be comforted by nice things, even nice, generic things infused with little meaning.

Having an allergy attack while leaning on an ornately decorated floral covered pillow must have a lower comfort level than leaning on a normal rectangular, pillow-cased pillow. Seeing pictures of family members or things that mean something to us is more comforting and homey than pictures of random animals and men right? I'm confused by this trend and why I feel the need to fluffisize and pink-out my room. In some ways our rooms are the only way we can distinguish ourselves amongst the rest of the forty girls in the dorm. Is the decorating a way to show other girls that we live up to the standards of comfort and coziness that girls are expected to cultivate? With things such as clothes and makeup, boys are often who we target our appearance to, but why do we feel our rooms need to be so dang pretty. What are we even trying to prove? Sure, Andover is a stressful place and going home to a comfortable room is an important part of unwinding, but why is our idea of comfort apparently so homogenized? Of course, a soft fluffy pillow is comfortable physically but why are cutouts of other people and other people's animals comforting? Why is seeing the picture of a while attractive, completely unknown to us actor? What about throw pillows that cause allergies is comfortable? If we decorate our rooms in this way in order to stand out, why do our rooms look so similar?

When one of my friends entered my room, he immediately commented on how it was so "artsy," as if I was trying to appear to not be like other girls. I immediately asked him what he meant, partly because I was angry at being accused of trying to be "artsy," and partly because I was interested in what he thought made a girl's room. He pointed out that I had a throw at the end of my bed, something that only "chicks" would have, and said that all the shelves I had with clothes was a girly thing, as well as having all my shoes lined up against the wall. Apparently, girls are supposed to be organized and neat? The "throw" at the end of my bed is a ratty old blanket I had from camp that my mom brought me after I woke up with what felt like ice cubes in my blood in November. I needed that throw, it wasn't about show. He pointed out how the lack of bright colors and wall decorations made it seem like I was trying not to be a girl, but all the neat stuff was indicative of my gender and gave away my real persona. Wall decorations? I have a map and a flag, as well as some dark colored silk scarves hanging on my walls. Apparently, he expected "pictures of dudes and flowers." Alright...

When I google, "pottery barn teen," above is what I found. Pottery Barn kids elicits:

If teenage girl are being told their rooms should look like the first two, and mothers are being told that their little girls' rooms should look like this, no wonder the pink, plush, fluffy girls room has become such a staple in girls dormitories at Andover. We are the Pottery Barn generation. No one knits their own bedding anymore, and more often than not it's easiest to order an entire bedroom on Pottery Barn than worry about picking out disparate parts and bringing them together in a bedroom. Bedrooms are meant to be slept in but we treat them as some extension or expression of who we are, yet we seem to cheat and buy all the same stuff from one store. Do we decorate our rooms like this to escape criticism and give the illusion of fitting in? Is it easiest to just not attract attention to our rooms by decorating with other things? A Pottery barn bedroom is a luxury, so is furnishing our rooms like those above a sign of status? I wonder if Pottery Barn sales went up after 911, when there was a shift back towards conventional families. Pottery Barn is "modern," it's furniture made of new materials, but its advertisement display images of families coming together, and kids who spend time alone in these ads, are spending it in the rooms their moms decked out for them with everything they'd possibly need or want. The families in the ads are perfect, the parents give their kids their own bedrooms, yet they all end up coming together as a family. They balance the modern movement of children away from the home, towards independence at a younger age, and keeping family values of trust and loyalty alive. Do we buy furnishings like these for ourselves and our kids because we really believe they're the best, the most adept at creating a truly comfortable place to live or because we believe it creates a comfortable landscape, capable of giving off the illusion of pure domestic bliss. What is true American comfort? What do Americans value when we want to relax?