Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Oh IKEA, I Am Such Your Bitch.

So here was the situation: having recently bought a Princess Leia slave costume, slutty Hogwart's student costume and sexy Christmas elf costume, I found that I was entirely out of room in my costume drawer* and also that I didn't have any other drawers. It was obvious that I needed another dresser. (Also because if I had another dresser I might be able to fit all the buildings in my Christmas village into one scene. For real, this is how I pick out furniture.) And for that I would need to go to IKEA.

There was only one problem: I don't really have time to go to IKEA. IKEA is a magical world full of rooms you wish you lived in, unpronounceable words and meatballs. And they build them like a Vegas casino in that once you're inside they hide all the exits to prevent you from getting out. You can lose three days in IKEA and not even realize it, and I can't have that happen right now because I have other shit to do (such as buying more slutty costumes - the Halloween stores only appear once a year people).

So this was my plan: I went online and checked inventory for the things I wanted (because I was also buying a night stand so as to hide my little bottles of lube in a drawer, yet have them still handily nearby) and I wrote down what aisle and bin I could find them in when I got to Schaumburg IKEA. That way I could bypass the Maze of Wonder and go straight to the warehouse and I would only lose the time it took for me to drive to Schaumburg and back (oh, also I actually printed out the directions for getting there. I always think I know how to get there, but IKEA Schaumburg is tricky in that you can see it from the highway and surrounding streets, but it is almost impossible to find the actual entrance. I once drove around for an hour before figuring it out).

My plan was sound. Really. It was. EXCEPT.

What I did not account for, because there was no way I could have known, is that right next to the place where they store the flatbed carts was a great big fucking display of Christmas decorations. IT WAS A SWEDISH CHRISTMAS WONDERLAND. It might as well have been a giant pile of crack. Clearly I wasn't going anywhere. There were shiny things! There were trees! There were adorable strings of snowflake shaped LED lights OMFG GIMME GIMME MORE MORE MORE MORE!

Yeah.

I have no idea how long I was trapped inside the holiday vortex - it could have been hours, it could have been weeks. What I do know is this: flat-packed dressers are fucking heavy.

I found this out while trying to wrestle one off of the shelf. I was really annoyed with myself because I've been weight training every other morning since April and I really ought to be able pick up and carry a four bedroom house by now. I was also really annoyed when an IKEA employee the size of an MMA fighter watched me have a cat fight with a box trying to get it into my car by myself while he calmly collected empty carts.

Upon returning home and dumping off my new possessions (after wrestling them up three flights of stairs first, natch) it was obvious that the only way to fix the fact that I'd wasted half a day wandering mesmerized through a warehouse and that I now had arms with the approximate strength of cooked spaghetti was to drink several margaritas and call it "lunch", then go drunk grocery shopping while simultaneously phoning the comic in England and then yelling at him for answering his phone when I wanted to leave a message. I wound up spending $52 on chocolate syrup.

Thanks, IKEA.


*I was giving an inventory of my huge collection of stereotypically slutty bedroom outfits (nurse, french maid, etc.) to a friend in an e-mail and got this response back, "You are either the perfect woman or a stripper."

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