A Totally Dramatic Story Involving A Bookcase, Part III.

Now, where was I? Oh, right -- having successfully obtained a bookcase, a broken car, and a raging hangover, it was time to Do Home Improvements.

The first order of business: bringing the bookcase inside.

With Brad at work -- and just two hours to spare before the car was slated to go in for a replacement windshield -- I was forced to transport the entire thing by myself. THE WHOLE THING. Piece by obscenely heavy piece, out of the car and up the three flights of stairs to our apartment. (I would like to point out that when Brad brought the bookcase down from its previous home, he had a) help, and b) an elevator. Which means that I am the motherfucking bookcase transporting MASTER.)

After traipsing up and down the stairs ten times with increasingly heavy pieces of wood, I finally cleared a space on the floor and sat down to look over the assembly instructions.

This was the first thing I saw.


Oops.

Apparently, when it comes to putting together their furniture, Ikea is proud to supply two types of instruction -- the How To, and the You're Doing It Wrong. It's like an oversimplified Goofus and Gallant, except without the helpful life-lesson captions.

Also, nobody wears clothes.


See? "Goofus tries to transport oversized pieces of wood by himself and gets angry! Gallant invites a fat naked friend to help him do the heavy lifting." According to Ikea, rather than bringing the bookcase upstairs by myself, the appropriate course of action was to: 1) take off all my clothes, 2) knock on my downstairs neighbor's door, and 3) ask him to be my partner in Naked Furniture Moving.

Damnit, why didn't I read the directions first? Why, why, why?!

But, since the bookcase was already upstairs in pieces, I decided to move on to step two -- this time with the conviction that I would follow the directions to the letter...


...um, except that the directions turned out to be this. I mean, it's been a week, and I still have no idea what is going on here. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that Naked Swedish Goofus tried to have fast dirty sex with the bookcase and ended up breaking it, while Naked Swedish Gallant made sure that the bookcase was comfortable and then engaged in mutually stimulating foreplay to ensure that the bookcase enjoyed itself just as much as he did.

And while I know that following directions is important, and that foreplay is vital to any healthy relationship, there is no way I was going to have sex with a bookcase. I mean, I am married, for Christ's sake.

So I skipped that step, too.

And then... well, I kind of skipped the rest of the steps. I mean, I did try, but the unfortunate thing about Ikea assembly instructions is that they forgo any sort of written direction entirely in favor of diagrams, all of which are totally inexplicable and look something like this:

Seriously, what the hell? I learned to read precisely so I wouldn't be confused by furniture assembly instructions later in life, and now this? Use your words, Ikea!

But after five hours -- sweaty, disheveled, and still bleeding from the place where I'd accidentally dropped a shelf on my toe -- I had done it.

Just as a reminder, this is what the room looked like before Home Improvements.

And this is what it looked like after:



And now, if anyone ever asks me, "What have you done that's worth being proud of?", my response will be: "I singlehandedly unpacked and assembled an Ikea bookcase AND avoided being murdered by giant ducks. Top THAT, you pissant."

The end!