Reasons I'm Not Looking Forward to Renting a Truck and Picking Up a Bed Tonight

The only thing missing from our apartment that we really need is a bedframe. We left Adam's old one in Berkeley, where it's probably by now been peeled apart and smoked. We picked out a new frame at Ikea that's probably the same one you have in your homes, given the speed at which it goes out of stock. But it's in stock tonight, and the truck's been reserved.

While I kind of notoriously have no sense of direction, there's not a doubt in my mind I couldn't navigate Ikea with my eyes closed at this point. We've been there, I think, four times since this move--the combination of Adam not coming from a land of Ikea and my joblessness means that the lure of cheap furniture is too strong to resist. It's gotten a lot nicer since my introduction to it in my first apartment out of college, but right as I'm getting comfortable in the store and convincing myself that adults shop there, too, I come across that table we all had two of (or four, if you were really classy and arranged them all together in the middle of the room so it looked like you had one big table):

Yeah, you remember that. It's called the Lack, and it's still $12.99. Inflation hasn't hit Ikea since 2003, but the Lack does come in several more colors now. I think my only option was "Birch Effect."

So, anyway, the other thing you don't realize about Ikea is that even though it IS incredibly convenient that all their furniture can be dismantled into teeny, tiny pieces and put into a box that you can strap to the top of your Volkswagon, those boxes are super-dense and your average 130-lb woman stands little to no chance of being able to haul them up four flights of stairs herself. And, frankly, that's usually my only contribution to the furniture effort, because I look at directions and my eyes start to cross and I usually end up going to bed crying before the project's complete.

Luckily, Adam sees the construction of furniture as a pleasure. Whereas my previous favorite Ikea assembly quote came from a former roommate's boyfriend, who, on their second date, decided he'd rather stay behind and assemble my bed than go out to dinner: "It's like Legos!," my new favorite comes from Adam, who, upon seeing the first page of instructions for our new bookshelf, gasped (sorry, Mom): "Aw, man, I'm gonna jizz in my pants!"

I did decide that there was one Ikea item I could handle entirely on my own: the mirror. It's just a wall mirror--the cheapest full-length one they had. Whereas my dear roommate doesn't seem to mind if his shoes are compatible with the length of his pants, I do, and, besides, the mirror is literally one one piece that gets stuck to the back of a door. I didn't think this could be difficult at all. BUT LOOK!

Four illustrated instructions. I have omitted nothing; there are no additional written instructions. I had to make them up.

.
Knife it off. Got it.



Find Silly Putty. Pet lovingly. Shape into wave, add tiny surfboard.


Stretch as far as possible.


Corn dogs make the sun rise.

This is just a MIRROR. And that's why I won't be participating in the assembly of the bed.

Standards

My last period of funemployment was wasted in a sea of afternoon marathons of Jon & Kate Plus 8 and Rock of Love Charm School (the good season, with Sharon Osbourne; none of this feud crap that’s currently on…which, by the way, I think Ricki Lake is handling remarkably well). While I’m certainly pleased that I had that time to catch up to the rest of the country in reality TV viewership, THIS time will be different. THIS time, I’m going to accomplish things—mainly stuff that I haven’t had time to do after work…mostly because that’s when I now watch my reality TV.

And since the end of unemployment coincided with a move, it’s a perfect time to consider this the beginning of a new lifestyle…one that’s organized, driven, goal-oriented, and something to be envied. I mean, who wouldn’t want to take time off work in their mid-20s? I didn’t even have to have a baby to do it! (I do, however, need to sell my car for cash money, something I was planning on doing anyway, and am counting on a tax refund when I finally get around to actually filing.)

The apartment is, of course, the most visible manifestation of my master plan, and since I’m now home so much more than Adam, it makes sense that 1) I’m bugged more by the fact that the whole place isn’t yet in order, and 2) It probably should fall to me to get most of our life’s possessions put away. Here’s the thing, though. When I left Boston for Denver over a year ago, everything I owned fit into my little Corolla. Adam was in a similar situation—he’d taken one Explorer’s worth of belongings to Denver. We had a sparse existence, and I don’t ever once remember saying, “Geez, what I couldn’t do with my milk foamer right now.”

It wasn’t that I was surprised when Adam rolled up to our new Berkeley apartment in December with a moving van full of things he had opted not to bring to Denver, but now needed to get out of storage in North Carolina. Grown-ups DO typically own stuff. And it’s not like that van was full of puppets (although there were some). It was packed with dishes and linens and DVD players and artificial Christmas trees—all things we use, and we use together, but…well, it’s not my stuff. And while most of it had a happy home in our Berkeley “storage unit” (a corner of the bathroom), now we’re at the top of three flights of stairs and have a utopian vision of having one of those cute little living rooms you see in Pottery Barn catalogs, where everything has a place and anything that’s not carefully filed away on a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf has been purposefully left out to indicate that we’re not uptight at all, and have led very interesting lives, and, really, we didn’t MEAN to leave that thank-you note from John Edwards out on the coffee table. We’re not sure how that ended up there. How embarrassing.

As you can see, we’re well on our way to realizing that vision:

But the rest of what’s going on here isn’t yet quite up to the standard I had imagined just a week ago. I’m not going to go into detail about The List Adam’s Given The Landlord, but when was the last time YOU needed to pre-dry your clothes before putting them in the dryer? Have you ever heard the sound of a dryer falling off a washing machine?

I’m not going to lie, though. I’m pretty proud of my innovation. It’s like living on the prairie up in here. In the days of yore, ladyfolk were always finding new ways to use the hooks on their overpriced kitchen islands:

And as long as I’m busy with laundry, I’m just not going to worry about the rest of it…like the fact that it looks like a band was executed in the corner of the living room.