You gotta EXACISE those chompas, pt. 1

2. Write a one-paragraph description of a room in your house. Use as many specific details and senses as possible.

As you walk through the broad entry, past the partly-sheathed pocket door, you'll see a room of contradictions. A spanking-new paint job in soft creamy Pottery Barn colors, but with noticeable chips where wall meets ceiling. A contemporary sectional sofa in sleek dark leather, surrounded on either side by the bright primary plastics of a toddler's toys. Piles and piles of hip-lit books crammed into dark wood mission-style shelves face off against an enormous flat-panel plasma TV that rises like an obelisk opposite the sofa. Modern, espresso-wood furniture cleaned to gleaming perches atop a shabby and pockmarked hardwood floor. A small longhaired tortoiseshell cat purrs with insistent contentment, her body scarcely making a dent on the firm sofa cushion. The soundtrack to the room is the white-noise hum of a baby monitor, the kind of loudness you don't notice until it's gone. Even the smells offer contradictions: coffee and pledge, leather and stale Cheerios. It's as if a yuppie and a suburban housewife are quietly fighting to the death in here, and maybe they are.