Decorative pillows were invented by someone with far too much time on their hands (Martha Stewart maybe? Or Jon Stewart?). Someone sat at home one day, staring at their empty bed thinking, “Hmm, this bed looks so plain. I wish there was a way to spruce it up so that when people come over I can direct them to my bedroom to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at the multicolored festival of fullness that is my once-drab sleeping quarters.”
“I know,” this person thought, “I’ll add more pillows—a virtual cornucopia of pillows. Beautiful, whimsical pillows that no one will ever be allowed to use lest they flatten and destroy the mirage of bed fullness. For me to be happy, to feel complete as a person, I need useless, colorful pillows.” The skyrocketing popularity of decorative pillows is loaded with hidden meaning that I have neither the time nor interest to explore, but I’ve been doing some informal calculations, and recently realized, I’ve lost nearly 6 full years of my life to the daily removing and replacing of decorative pillows on my bed and couch.
Each morning I wake up, make the bed, and spend 15-20 seconds putting useless pillows onto my Serta. Then, I waddle my fat ass out into the living room and take a seat on the couch to watch the news before the baby wakes up. I spend about 3 seconds taking pillows off the sofa—don’t want to sit on them and flatten them. Then I take another 10 seconds putting them someplace out of the way so they don’t look ugly not being on the couch and all. When I begin to hear stirring in the other room, I unpack and replace the decorative pillows, just in case the mailman breaks in and in the course of stealing our T.V. looks over in disgust at our naked couch. The same process gets repeated when I come home from work, get up to do the dishes, take out the trash, bath the baby, and go to bed. At that point, I spend another 30-45 seconds undoing the placement of my waking moments. My wife loses approximately the same amount of time every day to the same task, though she bought the damn things, so I’m not feeling too badly for her. All told, in an average day, I figure 22 hours are spent arranging pillows that I’m never allowed to use. I do far less work at my job than I’m forced to do on my couch. That, people of the world, is just f-ing wrong. And so, from this day forth, I declare proudly and anonymously, I hate decorative pillows. I hate the people that make them, that advertise them, that sell them in stores. White people of the world unite with me and stand up. Together our voices must cry out around the world: “White people hate decorative pillows!”
