Anyway BORING sorry. So the one thing I do want to blog about is my trip to Ikea yesterday. I spent a small fortune there. Okay, a large fortune. Okay, I spent almost a month's rent. Borrowed money, since I have zero income right now. On crap I don't need, and that I may never use, like six wineglasses. I have only one mouth and three hands, and I don't drink wine - why do I need six wineglasses? And a can opener which broke immediately. I rented a 15' van and drove twenty-five miles through the remnants of Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna, and Ike, which had created a flood on the highway on the way to Schaumburg, IL. I am doing really great at being in places that are flooding this summer. I drove 45 mph in the far right lane while cars lined up behind me and then angrily swerved around me. I rented the van at 11 a.m. and I returned to my house at 8 p.m. I spent three hours driving and loading, which means I spent six hours in the store. I ate two meals there - lasagna sitting down for lunch, and a hot dog standing by my shopping cart for dinner - and stopped for a lingonberry soda with a Mormon boy, which I will tell you about in a minute. The decisions I made were poor (kitchen table is twice as large as the space I have for it, etc.) and worse (my apartment came with a dozen pillows leftover from the last tenant, yet I still bought three pillows) and just plain old incredibly boring. Ikea is my idea of hell because, as you may know, making decisions about consumer products is my least favorite activity in the world. It took three trips to the cash register to buy all my crap, and I injured myself both in the loading and unloading of my haul but also in the assembly, since I don't own a screwdriver and tried to assemble almost a thousand dollars of furniture with my bike multitool. I will spend a brazillion dollars on furniture but not $1.50 for a screwdriver. I got home at 8 and was up until 3 a.m. turning screws with that tool. The 32 screws of my EINA bedframe alone took 52 minutes to screw in, but I am a fool like that, and time and carpal tunnels are what I have plenty of.
I am a little disgusted with myself about how quickly I went from resolving to eat oatmeal with my single ice cream scoop and sleep on my camping pad on the ground and using my one cup for both drinking and bucket showers, to yuppifying my life top to bottom. I mean, almost everything I own now is in birch veneer. But who cares. This is the working world. I make a JSP-11 salary. That's the way it happens. I gave my $250 to Barack. I did what I could. I am really just furnishing my apartment with nice shit because Stephanie appreciates it more than I do, and I am hoping one day she will move here and enjoy it, since the guilt prevents me from doing so. She likes wine.
But what I wanted to write about was meeting this Mormon guy in the Ikea. So I have written a bit about how I have turned into the world's friendliest chatty person. I think this is how I am going to cope with my homesickness and loneliness. I feel more open to meeting strangers and allowing myself to have unexpected experiences than I ever have before. Anyway, this Mormon boy was trying out beds when I was trying out beds. We each tried out all of the beds. I couldn't tell the difference between them. "What is the difference between these beds?" he asked. I said, "That's EXACTLY what I was just thinking!" We chatted about the pine vs. birch bed slats. I asked if he had just moved to Chicago, but he said he lived in faraway, rural Gailsburg, IL and came to Chicago once a year to visit his adoptive brother's birth parents. He was surprised I was a lawyer and was doubly surprised that I was 27. Then I didn't say goodbye, because we were strangers chatting in a store, and I pushed my plus-size grocery cart to the third floor, to collect side tables.
About an hour later, the Mormon boy found me in the kitchen table section, test-tapping on birch veneer for strength, and said, "Hey! Do you...like - coffee?" I scoffed, I really scoffed, and I said, "Who doesn't like coffee?" Turns out neither of us liked coffee and we got lingonberry sodas and sat in the Ikea restaurant on the third floor and chatted some more. It was not romantic at all. I think we were both bored and terrified by the fascist architecture of the Store From Which Escape Is Not Possible. He told me he was 23, a community college student taking his time to get through school, interested in studying art and engineering, helping a friend with a solar panel/hydrogen fuel project but had no business experience, a Mormon boy from Utah and one of ten siblings (I asked: they had a 15-seat van and never went to the movies). I said I was a lawyer only because I was sucking at the teat of career uncreativity, I liked New York and Chicago was not bad, and I hated making decisions.
His name was Gabriel. Gabriel wanted to move to Iowa. Why? I asked. "Because it's more conservative." I was interested in this. What do you mean? He said, "Well, I am really into owning guns." So then Gabriel told me all about his interest in guns. We were polite around this issue with each other. He prefaced by saying that he knew some people didn't feel the same way about guns and he didn't know how I felt but he believed gun ownership is an absolute right. I said, You know, I'm from California so I have a different relationship with guns than the rest of the country. He told me how he drove to Kentucky once for a militaria show. "The Show of Shows." I'd never heard about that. I said, I understand why some people like guns but for me it's a matter of where you live. In cities, people don't use guns the same way they do out in the country. He nodded, so there was detente. But I also said, I am for gun control but I am very interested in meeting people who can tell me about their interest in guns. He said in Iowa you are permitted to carry a concealed weapon, which you can't do in Illinois. I made a mental note never to visit Iowa. I told him how ridiculous I thought it was that after September 11 saw police officers with assault rifles on the D.C. subway. What was a cop going to do if a terrorist exploded a bomb - spray the subway car with semi-automatic fire? Gabriel agreed, and said, "You are supposed to kill someone with the smallest caliber weapon possible." I gave him my email because he said he didn't do the phone. If I am ever in Gailsburg maybe I'll drop you a line and you can teach me to shoot a gun! And if you are ever in Chicago, come stay in my extra bedroom.
I am feeling this way about people now because I am not scared about a nice, balding Mormon boy in non-ironic flannel being interested in guns. Gabriel and I probably don't vote the same way. I probably would not really get along with him if he tried to come to Chicago to visit me. But I don't care, because that is my life-mood right now. I feel open to this sort of thing. I'll let you know when this feeling changes.
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