Furnisklagen.

Okay so first of all, if you couldn't tell, I'm at work, which means that this point will be short and probably not that juicy. But you know, I felt compelled to make a little entry. And p.s. this won't be like about politics or gender or race or society, but just about the crazy culture that is post-grad living in the city.

So as most of you know or have probably surmised from all of these posts and the things I tend to write about, I am a newly graduated young woman living in the Big Ole' City for the first time. What you may not have known is that apartment living is rough and I have been living on an air mattress and out of a suitcase for the past month. But no more, I say! Well, at least to the suitcase (the air mattress is here until I get together those thousands of dollars that places charge for decent mattresses!) because this past weekend I made a trip to- da da da daaaa-

IKEA!!!

Yes yes, cheers, jeers and deers, everyone

Okay so if you're post-20 years old and don't know what Ikea is, then please crawl from under that rock, wipe the crap out of your eyes and clean your ears. I mean really, it's time to catch up with the times. Ikea is a wonderland for all new graduates and starting-anews, an emporium of well designed furniture at highly competitive prices.

Translation? A warehouse of trendy particle board in boxes that you have to assemble yourself.

So making it to Ikea was one story (word of advice: if your directions say to take the Upper Level of the GW Bridge- do not take the Lower Level- this would be classified as a bad choice and can lead you to frantically screaming "WHERE ARE WE" while driving somewhere in Jersey with shallow pools of dank water and ominous crowds of geese flying everywhere) but once we got there it was all gravy.

I mean, the people at Ikea know what they're doing. Do a little glitz and glam with the blue and yellow thing (and you probably thought that our designing skills at afropologë had no rhyme or reason. Yeah suckas, showed you, didn't we??), make re-creations of amazing rooms furnished entirely with their crap so that you "ooh" and "ahh!" and try all of the features (okay so I swirled a couple lazy suzans and lifted up the secret-storage bed, don't judge me!) and you can reel in the masses.

What you don't realize until later- when you're hauling that 60 pounds of wood "finish" and pressed wood chips up to your fifth floor walk-up, stopping every floor to break for air with tiny dogs barking at you through doors and bachata coming loudly from somewhere- is that you have to put this crap together, and that even though they say that it's easy unless you have power tools it's a ridiculous task to undertake.

So I finally get the crap up to the apartment, get it out to put it together, open the instructions and.. THOSE CRAPS WEREN'T IN ENGLISH.

Not only were they not in English, but they weren't in any other language, either! Just pictures of an oddly-shaped smiley-faced dude putting together things, with arrows and angles and pictures that left way more to the imagination than I would have liked. It's like okay I get it- you're an international company with branches all over the globe, printing out a billion different instructions with languages suited to a particular country could be a pain. But I'll be damned if figuring out how to put that crap together wasn't like reading hieroglyphs.

The moral of the story? When within the realm of my affordability, buy quality furniture. Additonally, pay someone else to move it in and set it up.

P.S. Doesn't Lazy Suzan sound like something dirty? Like the town ho who brings a little chair to her corner so the bottoms of her feet don't get sore? Yeah, I thought so, too.