Walking the Wall

This picture was on the side of a big square bag of recycled paper insulation pressed into a big brick (a big, HEAVY brick, I can attest to as I picked up, moved, sliced open, and broke up 33 of them today). According to this image, loading these bags of insulation into the machine that allows the person at the other end of that long tube to blow insulation into the attic to try and save heat/money this winter is a jolly fun time. Note the comfy short sleeve shirt, note the smile, note the carefree crumbling of the material into the machine, note the debris free air–note the lack of any goggles or mask. I can imagine birds whistling in the tree behind her, the sun shining over head, and children laughing on the swing set that is just out of sight.

What I don’t see in this picture is the lines on the machine that indicate the shaking and rumbling that the machine makes in the real world and I can assure you there wouldn’t be a bird for a mile, let alone in the tree behind that woman. I also don’t see her pounding the chunks of paper onto the grate at the top of the machine trying to get it to break up, and I don’t see finger nails being broken left and right trying to break the chunks off the brick in order to begin pounding said pieces into the grate. I also don’t see the puffs of recycled paper that blow out of the machine intermittently, coating everything around it…including happy smiling women…with powdered newspaper. Given that this machine emits bursts of powdered newspaper that gets everywhere (in your eyes, in your nose, in your mouth, in your ears, and etc), I want to know what kind of woman this is that she can stand there all happy and smiling with paper in her eyes, nose, ears, and mouth! Or, maybe she has some kind of magical bubble around her that doesn’t allow any bits of anything any where near her.

I am here to tell you that I do not have that kind of magical power, I do not have what it takes to keeps paper off of every inch of me and this picture is proof that the one on the bag is a lie. This is the truth, and it is terrifying.  It is only my indignation at the outrageous lie on the side of the bag that forces me to put this image up for the world to see. My only consolation when my husband pointed to the picture and asked me why I wasn’t smiling was that I was wearing his clothes. His favorite pair of pajama pants, his sweater, and his slippers…all covered with recycled paper bits. It is a small victory, but since I didn’t have birds singing over my shoulder, I had to take my little bits of happiness where I could find them.

And the fact that he looked worse than me at the end of the day: