Things I Am Over!

A good thing

Dear Martha,

I'm so grieved by the loss of your beloved Kublai Khan Paw Paw Chow Chow Chow. There just are no words for the loss of a pet, and I'm sure it's something that you're just not ready to talk about.

So let's talk about it because I have a question I fear only you can answer, a very typical dilemma that requires your professional input. My cat Cooper is almost 5 years old, and at current weight the shape of a medium-sized dog. I would say Jack Russel terrier size, maybe even Boston terrier, he's most definitely the size of some terrier type. He is the size of a dog, Martha, is what I'm getting at.

I've done all I can to curb his weight including limiting his food supply (which wasn't met with kind reaction) and buying several toys that he would play with one day and the next claim to be freaked the fuck out by them and run and hide when they were presented. My feeling is this fear of toys is an act he uses to gain sympathy and handfuls of Pounce treats, which I give him without fail or limit.

My question is simple: while a massive heart attack is imminent for Cooper because he eats food all day long and refuses to burn off any of his blubber, I need to start making preparations for the day when perhaps he's no longer waking me up at 4am to be fed. Pretty soon, his heart is going to Chris Farley on him and I'm not going to notice because I'll think he's just collapsed in his food bowl like he does every night after gorging himself of Fancy Feast Elegant Medleys Florentine Tuna.

So tell me, if you can, do you have a pattern for this awesome doggie body bag you showed off on your blog? It looks like the perfect fit, and the ribbon is a delicate yet striking touch. If you don't have a pattern for it, can you at least suggest a traditional and durable fabric I can use to make one?

When I see this awesome picture of Britney Spears having another meltdown, all I can think is...

OH. MY GOD. The shoes!! Where did she get the shoes!?!?

 

Trendsetter

Since it's basically winter now, I've bought myself a gaggle of winter-type clothings, from gloves and scarves to this oddity I've never known before: the winter hat. I have three hats I try to wear interchangeably, and I'm still getting the hang of how to coordinate my outfits around them. Do I take the hat off when I get inside? Is it a part of the outfit itself, or an accessory akin to the purse or scarf? Does it stay on, or come off? I really don't know.

Today I donned one of my favorite new hats as part of my outfit and wore it all day long. Through brunch and shopping and a doomed trip to a suburban Wal-Mart in search of my self-worth (found it! Right in the men's leather goods aisle, next to the Cheetos), then on the way home I finally took my hat off in the car. My hair was a nest of sweaty unconcern, my forehead adorned with the imprint of a slightly too-tight brim. Embarrassed at my own reflection in the rearview mirror, I just sighed and put the hat back on, and kept going through my day.

Then I felt this odd prick on my forehead, almost like a bee sting, right under the brim of my hat. I rubbed the spot a bit and the pain went away, and I thought, "Huh. Weird. You'd think I got a bee sting while sitting here in my car in the snow in the middle of Chicago. Guess not, since I don't see any bees around."

A couple hours later, I was sitting on my couch watching 3 Tivo'ed episodes of 30 Rock and I felt that weird pain again in the same spot. By this time the hat had been off for quite some time, and as I lifted my hand to touch my hairline, I caught a glimpse of my left thumb drawing close. And it, along with my index finger and half my palm, was covered in dried blood.

Panicked I jumped up and ran to the bathroom to look myself in the mirror. From the epicenter of pain where that imaginary bee had stung my forehead, splaying out and down my face were trails of blood, caked to my skin for hours. It wasn't a bee sting at all, apparently it was some weird phantom gash across my forehead that had been there for GOD KNOWS HOW LONG! While I sat around my house watching reruns I was also losing however many pints of blood it takes to PAINT a human forehead with dark, cracking red without them even noticing.

Since I'm apparently oblivious to my own pain, that means I was also oblivious to the fact that I had been bleeding from the face for hours, and when I picked up the hat I'd been wearing this feeling was confirmed when I saw the entire inside of it was also covered in my own blood. Then everything made sense when I noticed that sticking out of the inside of the brim of my new hat was THE OPEN SAFETY PIN used to affix the price tag.

How did I, #1, not realize that the price tag was still hanging from the inside of my hat? And #2, that the safety pin holding it to my hat was not only open but IMPALING me each time I put the hat on? Was I so obsessed with looking presentable in my new winter clothes that I convinced myself I was being stung by a bee each time I put a hat on? How could someone be so stupid, and why didn't anyone tell me the entire time I walked around the suburbs?

They probably saw me coming in my hoodie and Chuck Taylors and blood-soaked hat, face painted with bright red blood frozen to my skin, and said to each other, "That must be a new trend or something, I bet she got it from Hannah Montana."

Just for once...

I think it would be cool if Denzel Washington was in a movie was was based on a completely false, made up story. I don't know for certain, but something tells me he should give fiction a try.

I just want you to see what's on the left side over there...

I just want you to see what's on the left side over there...
Originally uploaded by sarahhatter.

...can you see it? There's a few little star-shaped white icons that seem to be falling from the sky. Can you tell what that is?

Ok, let me help you: IT IS MY DREAM COME TRUE.

Bookwormed

On Tuesday of this week, I went back to college.

Well, technically I did, but literally I'm not enrolled per se, I just paid them enough money for the registrar to say  I'm a student and I get to go to one class. It's what they call a "graduate prep course" or for the layman, a crash course in figuring out whether you're cut out for grad school and if you remember your times tables.

I barely know my times tables past the 4's, and I stutter trying to spell out loud, though I'm not afraid to say I'm a pretty smart little girl. Nevertheless, I often get an itch to have someone explain fractions to me in a classroom setting, or sit in on a lecture about the history of brick building. I have sudden intense cravings to go back to school which last only so long for the university to cash my check, then I just stop showing up for class. This, however, is different, because I've fooled my psyche with my own clever game: the class is only 6 weeks long.

To start, aptitude tests were given, simple assessments of each student's current ability to fill in tiny squares with tiny pencils. Then an essay was required on an entirely random subject, and then a very unscientific IQ test was handed out that we were free to take home and bring back to the next class. I did well on the aptitude test, I'm certain I did well on the essay portion, but the IQ test? I'm thinking not so much.

One of the reasons I decided to take this class was because in late August, I discovered a setting on my phone called "games". This menu item stored within its pixelated bowels a plethora of distractions, everything from Monopoly to Tetris, to a "pro" version of Bejeweled I had never dreamed existed. At the moment I was discovering this electronic wonderland, I had just finished Malcom Gladwell's Blink, and had moved on to a similar book, Crimes Against Logic. This was after I read The Tipping Point, Status Anxiety, and five other very heady, philosophy-laden books in the course of a month. Crimes Against Logic creaked open before me, my phone rang, my fingers slipped and I hit a strange series of numbers.

Since that night, there is a good chance I haven't touched a book, let alone opened up to a page and set my eyes across the letters and lines. I've been playing Bejeweled Pro and Monopoly for hours a day. I spend nights curled up in bed, heart racing while my fingers dance across the keypad, my blood pressure soaring while I attempt to stack colored blocks atop each other like a hyperactive toddler doped up on sugar cereal at 6am. I decide to stop playing only when I cannot physically keep my eyes open any longer, only after I've relegated myself to one-hand playing while I rest my head on the other, covers pulled to my chin.

It's partially this obsession that made me want to rebuild my intelligence quotient with a class or two, and partially why I'm probably going to fail the ungraded, not-for-credit course. I brought home the IQ test and prepared myself for test taking. I cleared my desk of distraction, turned on some soothing music, sharpened my No. 2 pencil and opened the test with a deep breath.

First Question: Something about how something has this many things and something else has that many...I don't know, SKIP!

Next Question: SSASSASSSA is to 9919919991 as ASSASSASS is to...Ass is to what? Wait, ass is to sass? Ugh, I don't know, SKIP!

Some questions I new immediately, anything having to do with simple pattern recognition or "which comes next in this series of shapes" I was certain of the answer. The long paragraphs of logical discourse I could barely comprehend, so I picked something, anything, I just filled in the box.

At the next class we submitted our ScanTron sheets for scores, and when my answer sheet ran through the machine the tech stopped and looked at me. "HHmmm," she said. "Hold on a sec."

She looked over my scores and ran the answer sheet through again, and again said, "Hhmmm?" I asked her if it wasn't registering, perhaps my pencil was a No. 1 and not a No. 2?

She said, "No, it's working all right, but it's saying you only got a 60. Like, a score of 60."

An IQ of 60.

This was not correct. I know I'm dense at times but I am not that dense. I've been to college before, it's not like I don't know things. The instructor came over and looked at the score and back at me and asked, "Did you do this test yourself? It was a take home test, did you research any answers?"

"Of course not!" I said. "I was just trying to get it done!" Then I realized that was my problem, I'd just turned an IQ exam for graduate courses into a game of Bejeweled Pro, for no reason other than my addiction to video games had sequestered my subsconscious into a live version of Beat the Clock! Instead of taking my time and reading the questions and actually answering them, I just answered as quickly as possible. On a take home test.

I asked the instructor if I could take the test again, and coldly, as if it didn't matter, he said, "Well it really doesn't matter. It's just a test."

All I could think, standing there before my IQ of 60 in red print across my answer sheet, was that IT DOES MATTER, because I'm not retarded! I just like stacking colored blocks!!

Calling the black kettle

This woman on Oprah was talking about how we all have our acts of desperation, and she said, "That's when you're eating a bag of potato chips over your kitchen sink at 6am."

And I'm just like, Fuck you and your hidden cameras in my house, that is ILLEGAL!

The Miracle Worker.

My cleaning lady is Ukrainian, which has posed some ridiculous problems since the day we met. First, I should say I don't really know that she's my cleaning lady since she introduced herself in Ukrainian. She's either my cleaning lady, or possibly the president of the Ukraine was just walking around my neighborhood one day with a Swiffer mop and keys to my apartment. Either one. I still can't understand her.

The first day she was there I had just moved in and the place was a mess and she was very glad I had my own cleaning products for reasons I couldn't understand. For almost an hour she spoke nothing but Ukrainian, so I just kind of nodded along or said nothing at all. She would say something long and Slavic and I would just look at her kind of dazed, like I was really trying to process whatever she said in Ukrainian. I wasn't. Ever. I was just watching her talk and motioning to things, staring at her mouth twisted into foreign shapes as she cooed entirely unintelligible phrases to me. I just stood there, staring at her mouth.

Then, when she was about to leave, she said, "Two weeks Tuesday?"

Two weeks Tuesday!? Them is American words! I replied, "Yes! Tuesday!" Then she said, "Then once month after Tuesday."

Holy crap, this whole time she spoke some English and didn't tell me! Here I was pantomiming Mr. Clean Magic Eraser when I could have just said, "Mr. Clean Magic Eraser." I was so excited I just repeated to her as she walked down the stairs, "Two weeks Tuesday! Two weeks Tuesday!"

Two weeks Tuesday she came back, this time again speaking only in Ukrainian for almost an hour. I helped her scrub some lingering scum off my range top and at one point she stopped, faced me and touched my shoulder and said slowly, "No. BL. Each. On. Sto. Ve." For a moment, afraid she might be having a stroke, shook my head sort of panicky and said, "What?? What?? What??" She repeated herself a little faster, again touching my shoulder but also tapping her lips, as if to make me look at her mouth. "No bleach on stove. Never. No bleach on stove."

I gave her a look of acceptance and thanks and nodded, thinking I got it, lady. No bleach on the stove.

Later, as I walked past her she grabbed my arm, pointed to her mop and said just that, "MO. P. Mop." She tapped her lips and pointed to mine.

"Mop?" I said.

"MOP!" she said.

Mop. Let's alert the media to the profundity of the moment.

She left soon after, I chanted "Two weeks Tuesday" as she tromped down the stairs and continued to think that perhaps she's just learning English now, maybe that's it. I came up with this whole sympathetic story about her coming to the US on a limited work visa, living with distant family in a cold shack across town, taking the bus to my house every two weeks Tuesday to clean my grimy stove and try her darnedest to speak in my native tongue, the tongue of the Americas! Of liberty and justice for all!

When she pulled up this morning in her Mercedes SUV, I felt less sympathetic.

Her sympathies for me, however, had not shifted at all, which was obvious when she set down her cleaning supplies, came over to me with a wide smile and presented a book she'd brought with her for us to read together: "Working With The Deaf and Dumb: Easy Illustrated Sign Language For Everyone!"

Bonnie & Clyde

A few weeks ago, my friend Steven and I were driving around downtown Chicago looking for a place to buy pants. More specifically, we had five hours to kill so pants buying became our agenda, and that meant we had to 1) find a place to buy these pants and 2) park the car within 2 miles of said place while 3) paying less than $28 an hour for the luxury of doing so. Obviously, we were on a mission.

In a freak turn of events we found just what we were looking for in the same place: a store for buying pants down the block from a parking garage attached to a sports bar. Better yet, we learned that if we had our parking ticket validated at the sports bar we would only have to pay $7 an hour for the privilege, and we even got to keep our first born children! This was way better than the time we went to Navy Pier in the middle of winter to find everything closed and out of service and then had to fork over $43, 12 pints of blood and donate all our body hair to Locks of Love just to park there. So $7 and a beer at a sports bar seemed like a steal.

But if you didn't know, Dave & Buster's isn't a sports bar. It is in fact something entirely different, something that can't even rest itself near the spectrum of being a sports bar. It's actually a casual dining experience tucked inside a 2-story arcade, packed to the gills with mozzarella sticks and flashing, whirling video games and the occasional skee ball thrown haphazardly across the room by a child whose hands were too greased up by his sampler platter to get a good grip. We ascended the stairs into neon signed oblivion, and all Steven could say was, "I am absolutely beside myself."

Dave & Buster are apparently the meth head cousins of Chuck E. Cheese, and they've made a corner of downtown Chicago their own private crack house.

We fought out way through the crowd to find someone, anyone, who could help us. Imagine the drone of penny slots combined with the continuous knocking of a bowling alley and the high pitched squealing of 500 children with single-digit ages and you'll know what it was like, and while normally we wouldn't put ourselves in that kind of environment voluntarily, we had to accomplish getting our parking validated before we were free to leave. As we waited, I spied something that would bring us to our doom. There, only ten feet away from me perched on the edge of a mahogany bar was a touch-screen video game console hosting the only thing that could get me to hang out in an arcade in the middle of the day: A MegaTouch Force 2006 with Castle Bandits.

I told Steven immediately, "Oh my GOD. We have to play, this is the greatest game ever!" Steven was incredulous until I explained to him that this game was ridiculously amazing and addictive, and that I would routinely  go to bars in the middle of the day just to play it and sometimes never even had a drink! The fact that I could be in a bar and be so distracted by a video game that I could not have a drink drew Steven into submission, so we ordered a Dave & Buster's Player's Club card full of $10 in $.25 increments and sat down to play for a bit.

Three hours or so later, we'd been sitting there high-fiving each other to sheer victory over Castle Bandits and hadn't even realized that we'd racked up over $50 in Dave & Buster's Player's Club credits. But it was worse - I'd turned Steven into a Castle Bandits addict. While I was in the bathroom he was secretly playing games without me. When people would come up to the bar to order drinks, Steven would reach over and  steal the Player's Club cards they'd set down and replace it with his empty one. When I found out that Steven was trying to bribe small children to trade their Player's Club cards for his bowl of pretzels, we obviously had to leave.

We left the place shaking with stimuli like it was 1978 and we'd just been freebasing in a dumpster behind Studio 54. If you've never played this game, you don't know what it's like, waking in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, wondering where the closest MegaTouch Force 2006 is in proximity to your bedroom, how many quarters you've got at the bottom of your purse, if the neighbors would look at you funny if they saw you scavenging under the seats of your car for more. It's the most ridiculously out-of-control feeling when just one fix leaves you entirely feigning for more, and you can't shake the craving out of your head for weeks. All. You. Think. Is Castle. Bandits.

It's been a month since then and I'm still getting text messages from Steven in the middle of the night that proclaim, "I"m in a bar and this place doesn't have Castle Bandits and I'm about to GO OFF ON SOMEONE!!!!"

This isn't going to be fun

My UHaul mover's guide suggests I spend the next three weeks packing my house up one "Zone" at a time, a new one every other day. This was awesome when I decided to start with the kitchen, because it was a quick series of spoons and bowls and before I knew it I had a bunch of rooms shoved into Tupperware bins and stacked in the corner. This wasn't awesome when I needed to actually cook something today and realized OMG WHAT ZONE WAS THE SPATULA!?

Spidey Sense

I parked my car in a garage today and as I stepped out of it and shut the door, I turned to walk away and instead stopped dead in my tracks because of the quarter-sized spider hanging precariously between my car and the one next to me, dangling on an invisible spider high wire. Coming face to face with a dangling spider obviously fucked up every plan I had for the day.

For a long time, forgetting that I was in the garage to park my car and go meet someone, I stood there paralyzed by this beigey-colored spider with black spots and crooked legs, all splayed out before me like some sunbathing predator perched in midair by magic. I was completely STUCK between the cars watching this spider and wondering why spider maneuvering isn't covered in any kind of required college course, or at least for elective credit. That's a class I would have taken instead of ballet, which sure, I got credit for, but there's no way to pleia yourself out of parking garage spider showdown, is there? Wait, is there?

I had two options, three if you count my plan to befriend the spider and invite it to come hang out with me for the day, thereby neutralizing the threat of it crawling all over my face. I would get its email address and send it an Evite for a day of fun, I'd use a whimsical theme with cupcakes and a cartoon girl on a scooter. We could do Sudoku and it could put corn rows in my hair and we could play this other game I made up since I've been working from home called How Many Coke Zeros Can I Consume In One Day. The spider would probably win that game, with the 8 arms and all, and that ability to consume 10 times its body weight.

The more realistic options (since when do spiders have email?) was to either duck under the spider and quickly run away, hoping to God it didn't plan a sneak descent during my dropping and rolling and start crawling all over my face, or I could inhale deep, blow the spider out of my path and run for cover before it swung back to crawl all over my face. I tried out both of these options with a quick limbo under the spider and a test of my lung capacity, and neither seemed a practical solution.

I was out of options. I'd been standing there theorizing resolutions for Spider v. Human for over ten minutes, which is a long time when you're staring at something that's staring back at you with 8,000 eyes and practically as many appendages. There was absolutely no way I could get around this creature unless I actually got near it, which would only lead to the disastrous event of the spider possibly having a 1 in 100 chance of maybe coming close to being near enough to touch me. So I did the only thing left to do, the only practical thing to do. I got back in my car and moved ten spaces over.

To Perfection

I was just at the bank getting a cashier's check which, in and of itself, is a sign of obvious maturity. You really only need a cashier's check to pay off your bookie, buy a new-to-you Saab, launder some money for one mob family or another, or (in my case) pay the deposit on your new home. (The money laundering thing I took care of last week.)

At the bank the Russian teller was more than nice, more than accommodating, she was in fact the nicest person I've ever met. So nice that I didn't even notice it taking her 37 minutes to complete my transaction. I just stood there talking with her about my hoodie, then about Russia, then about how hoodies would be great for wearing in Russia. During a lull in the conversation after we agreed that hoodies would probably be bulky under all that fur, she asked, "So are you on a break from school?"

Perhaps this question was prompted by my elbows resting precariously on the counter in front of her, my legs dangling on tippy-toes as I stretched to seem taller than natural, or the hoodie we'd spent so much time discussing that is a child's size large and has giant birds and pink and purple hearts embroidered to it. Or the pigtails. Or the fact that my chin is broken out in a pubescent pre-menstrual constellation that if looked at properly under a telescope easily spells out the phrase, "ASK ME ABOUT HOW I AM 16 YEARS OLD."

I took a big sigh and responded to her, "No, I'm not in school. I am. Actually. Nearly 30."

With the sound of that little number breaking through the space-time continuum, she was shocked into staring at me in silence, a flag of incredulity waving behind her violently as the winds of my confession bowled her over. I just stared back while she stared at me, and all I could think to say was, "I know." She just stood there staring at me, that Russian gaze of disbelief piercing my soul.

After the storm died down and I explained to the Russian teller how I'm often mistaken for a 16 year old, she said casually, "Oh no, I would have said 19." Which of course gave me great relief because at least she didn't just start processing a cashier's check for thousands of dollars for someone who could barely drive. The idea of a 16 year old needing a cashier's check is scary to me, but a 19 year old, well that's more likely, isn't it? At least she has some professional standards. Then she told me about how when she turned 30 she already had two children and been married ten years, and then handed me the cashier's check she'd written out to Crappy Apartment Leasing Agency For Pathetic Single People Who Have Given Up On Love, LLC.

Finally, as situations like this always end, she had to ask the same questions I'm always asked when the subject of my age comes up, Do I like looking so young? Does it ever frustrate me? Has it ever hindered any choices I have made in life? I answered her questions as I aways do, by reciting her the essay I wrote to get into college ELEVEN YEARS AGO that revolved around my struggles as a 5-foot-even person with facial features that resemble a Disney-drawn chipmunk. I capped it off with, "In conclusion, I have learned a lot from looking like a child as a grown adult. Specifically, I have learned never to talk too long with men in bars, because if they're attracted to me, that means they're child molesters. (But always get them to pay my tab before I leave.)"

Bad Dreams

After a long history with all sorts of sleep aids and narcotics, I decided to switch back to the herbal type this week, the slightly useful Melatonin. In the years since I've taken the stuff I've forgotten what kind of deep, hypnotic sleep it will pull over you in five minutes flat, but it's also the first time I've woken up at 6 am with the gusto of a college cheerleader ready for a long bus ride across state lines. Basically I'm awake, but it didn't come without cost.

In the past two nights I've had the most frightening nightmares of my life, the depths and crevasses of my psyche making themselves known through subconscious self-expression. Last night was the worst ever. After watching a terrifying Prime Time Live about these deep water divers who died retrieving the skeleton of another deep water diver 850 feet below and this other nature show about the world's longest python that two huge men couldn't even pin down, it was obvious my dreams were going to be of the nightmare variety.

But drowning and snakes have nothing on my brain, I dreamed of something far more horrifying: I had a nightmare that my body was possessed by the spirit of Tom Arnold.

FAR MORE HORRIFYING!

In this dream within a dream, I could see myself in my own body, desperately trying to open my eyes but being held back by the demon spirit of Tom Arnold. The rouse here, the scary part if you will, is that the me inside my dream was being tortured with flashbacks of Tom Arnold's life and career every time I closed my eyes. They fluttered shut despite my resistance and whole episodes of Roseanne flashed before me mixed with sidebars of True Lies and that one guest staring role on Veronica's Closet. The whole time he cackled in my ear devilishly declaring he had tattooed my face on his chest, and kept holding me down to show it off.

WTF? I have no idea.

I woke from the dream at 3:16 am soaking with sweat as if I had been thrashing around fighting off the devil of Tom Arnold in real life. My heart pounded as my entire soul shook within me in absolute fear. It was the kind of fear you feel when you hear a sound outside your window at night and spend the next 4 hours awake wondering if someone is breaking into your house and if so, what you'll use to kill him once he's in your room.

The rest of the night I laid in bed shivering with fear, oscillating between brief intervals of sleep and waking in a panic. I managed to finally doze off for good a few hours later but when I woke up, I felt dirty, like my dreams had totally contaminated my body with evil. Later in the day someone asked me if I'd slept well the night before, I must have been acting incredibly off-kilt for it to shine through my usually strange and awkward personality. I responded without hesitation, "I had a dream I was being possessed by the demon spirit of Tom Arnold," and immediately heard all these cuckoo clocks going off.

Signed by Ira Glass

  Signed by Ira Glass 
  Originally uploaded by sarahhatter.

If you haven't already signed up for a chance to win one of these awesome posters signed by Ira Glass of This American Life, you probably should go do so now!

Donde esta aqui

The past 7 days have been incredibly productive for me as I transition from office life to home office life and fulfill my dreams of telecommuting during endless Tivoed episodes of Silver Spoons and 21 Jumpstreet. This has been one of the most disappointing themes of my adulthood, missing all the daytime reruns of my favorite childhood tv shows because I had to sit in a square box eight hours a day in order to pay my cable bill. But now that my paycheck is dependent on me sitting on my couch all day with a computer on my lap, avoiding all signs of human life for the majority of the day while I stare into the oblivion that is the internet, I can listen to the drone of Ricky Stratton in the background and finally feel whole again.

In order to get my home office in working order, I persuaded myself to enforce Extreme Home Makeover laws in my house this past week, which unfortunately meant incurring a long and lonely trip to Ikea on a hot Wednesday afternoon. I needed a dresser, a desk, some shelves and some tables, easy enough since I had it all written down. It would have been a much quicker trip if when picking up the five foot long fold out map to the premises I'd noticed that I'd grabbed the Spanish/Russian version, instead I circled the first two floors in a sweaty panic repeating to myself "Estoy aquí. ¿Donde está aquí?" I donde esta-ed myself for an entire hour before finally realizing it didn't matter if I knew wherever I was going in Ikealand, holy shit aquí I was.

I managed to make it to the self check out warehouse in the bowels of modular furniture hell only two and a half hours after arriving. All I had drawing me to the exit was the smell of meatballs wafting from the cafeteria below me. What kept me there another two hours was the list of 5 pieces of furniture I'd decided to buy in my left hand while my right hand stroked my chin incredulously as I wondered how the fuck I was going to get it all into my car. You see at Ikea, they don't help you with anything, including but not limited to getting furniture off shelves, showing you how to get furniture off the shelves, and holding your flimsy cart steady as you attempt to fill it with heavy boxes of particle board only to shove said cart to the very end of the aisle with the awkward momentum of a single woman about ready to go ape shit on the world because NO ONE IS HELPING HER.

When I did ask a woman in a hideous yellow polo shirt for assistance with at least holding my cart still, she replied by saying, "I guess Tom's on his break, of course." I don't know who the fuck Tom is but at this point I didn't care, all I could think of was shoving meatballs down this woman's throat until she kept my cart from rolling away again. In a polo shirt that ugly there was no way she had a man at home, of course she knew how difficult this was for me!

The dresser I bought, the highest priced dresser at the cheapest furniture distributer on earth, came unassembled with 216 total pieces. Before I even opened the box that I'm sure was made of the same material as its contents, I had two obvious options: 1) hang myself right then and there in my own garage; or 2) assemble the 6 foot high dresser and then hang myself, since I could easily climb atop it to reach the rafters and given my shoddy craftsmanship, I'm sure I wouldn't support my weight. That way, at least I wouldn't have to worry about how to kick the box out from under my feet, I could just cough and let nature take its course as the dresser crashed upon itself below my dangling feet.

Determined to be independent and self-sufficient, I spread out all the pieces in the first box on the garage floor and confidently pulled out the instructions. The instructions that had. No. Words. Just pictures, and bad pictures at that, and I was right then and there totally screwed. I managed to interpret the charades included in the box for some semblance of direction, and muddled my way through 216 pieces for each of the five separate pieces of furniture.

From sunrise to sunset I had traversed the barren wilderness of Swedish particle board alone, and I had come out alive with only two bleeding fingers and a very sore back. At 5:48 that evening, six hours and forty five minutes after I tore through the first cardboard box and dove into an afternoon of loose screws and wooden dowels, I had a 6-drawer dresser standing before me in a wobbly stance of accomplishment. It was a pathetic success, sure, but it was my first success as a single, home office having person who didn't need Tom or anyone else on their break or not to help me through it. That night I was so swelled with pride that I even had people come see what I had done, smiling as they said, "It looks good!"

My only reply was, "Yeah, it looks good! Don't touch it, move away."