Apr. 19th, 2010 at 2:57 AM
Day #13 Following the Instructions on Manifesting Your Soul Mate
Good News: The Long-Awaited Bed And Ongoing Space Shift
The new mattress and accoutrements arrived. Better news: the computer is now out of the bedroom and in the new computer room, and the nice man from Comcast did the entire move in about 15 minutes.
It appears that my soon-to-be-arriving soul mate is wisely delaying his appearance until he’s certain he won’t be walking to a den of chaos, and I can’t say I blame him. To ameliorate the appearance of progress, I’ll first report on the famous “Bob-o-Pedic”.
Pros: it is comfortable. based on the reviews of other people, I had expected it to be as hard as a rock until it had the time to “breathe” after being unpacked. But it had arrived by truck and hadn’t needed to be vacuum packed for shipping. When I had all the bedding on it and laid down, I thought, “this is nice!” before passing out and sleeping, undisturbed, for two hours. So thumbs up on the sleeping comfort. And for the first time in five years, my back didn’t hurt when I woke up! A not-so-fond good riddance to the flimsy, sagging, single mattress (which was only supposed to last four months) that I was trapped on for five years thanks to the Evil Ex-Relative, who stole my good bed for herself. The thing darn nearly crippled me.
And this is the bed and two nightstands I put together. This is not my bedroom -- I only wish I had a view like that outside my French doors … although it would probably be more likely if I had any French doors.
Bob-o-Pedic Cons: Thumbs down on the smell, though. It did have a pretty obnoxious chemical smell at first, which dissipated in about a week’s time. The bedding masked some of it, and it obviously didn’t prevent me from falling instantly asleep on it. It didn’t seem to deter the family felines, either – on the first day, Peanut also passed out cold under a new comforter on top of the bed, snoring loudly.
After struggling for another day assembling the two nightstands, I washed walls and dug through my tool chest again, hunting for the new picture hangers. A few weeks earlier, as I had nothing on my walls whatsoever, I had in fact splashed back to Ace for picture hangers on the fourth day of a bad 4-day nor’easter or whatever that deluge was that basically turned North Andover into The Island of North Andover, because so many creeks had flooded their banks and spilled over onto the exit roads. By the time I returned to my car, the rain had turned to ice pellets about the size of small peas, but they were still quite hard enough when being shot at me from the sky, thank you very much.
I think I’ve only experienced being outside in a strong hailstorm only once before, and I’d been in Manhattan at the time, able to duck into tall buildings in a single bound and watch other people shrieking as they were pelted with ice. This time it was me, caught outside in an open parking lot with nowhere to go and yelling “Ouch! Oooof! Owww!!! What the …?!?” Spent the next day with all these bright little red marks on my arms and face, looking like I’d been attacked by a frenzied boyfriend with a penchant for inflicting oddly shaped hickeys. I should have only been so lucky. Nope. Just getting shot with ice ball bullets.
Screwing Finials and The Great Styrofoam War: How the Chinese Plan to Take Over the World
Anyway, two nice guys from Bob’s assembled the furniture for me, leaving me only the table lamps to assemble. Easy enough were it not for the styrofoam packaging which had begun to disintegrate on its trip from its original home in China (of course), styrofoam being the only known man-made substance on earth designed to defy the laws of gravity. It occurred to me that THIS, and not war, is China’s plan for bringing down the United States. While we’re all distractedly picking pesky gravity-defying bits of clinging styrofoam off ourselves, they’ll just walk in and take over and we won’t even notice.
When I’d first looked at the photo of the lamps, I’d thought they had a simple, unremarkable silver metallic base. Turns out they’re actually in the shape of antique Grecian urns, painted to look, as they say in the biz, “distressed”.
Sure. I often entertain guests so dumb they walk in the door and exclaim, “Wow! You took expensive antique Grecian urns that belong in a museum and had them made into lamps! How clever of you!” I draw the line at having friends that dumb and would immediately ask them to leave and never return.
But I have to say, in assembling the lamps I came across two of the strangest assembly instruction lines I’d ever read:
1. PLACE HARP ONTO SADDLE. Place harp … onto saddle. Hmmm. The visual images that instantly arose from that one line cannot be put into words. Well, they can, but not in THIS journal.
2. PUT SHADE ONTO HARP AND SCREW FINIAL. After that first line, I was no longer sure where the Chinese were going with these instructions. Possibly, rather than initiating The Great Styrofoam War, they meant to walk in and calmly take over while we were choking over their odd assembly instructions.
How to Put a Bag Over The Head of Your Beloved … TV
Some Feng Shui people also tell you not to have exposed electronics, such as computers or television sets, in the bedroom. This is bad news for people who actually are in the habit of falling asleep while the TV is on. Nothing puts me to sleep faster than most of the mindlessly numbing programming Comcast throws at me every night, guaranteed to ensure that viewers in the rest of the world see Americans as nothing but violent criminals and stupid, shrewish women with the personal hygiene of dumpster-diving alley cats.
On the other hand, other practitioners tell you differently: if you need to sacrifice your own comfort in order to Feng Shui a living space, it’s not productive use of Feng Shui. Leave the TV there and enjoy it, is their advice. Quick executive decision: let’s go with that one!! I compromised by searching for a TV armoire. The TV would be in the bedroom, but behind closed doors. Big mistake.
The armoire, from a San Francisco company called Mercantila, first took the money and did nothing with it. Consequently, I next found myself battling a Customer Disservice Department straight out of the bowels of Hades, who first disconnected me several times, then nearly bit my head off for wanting to know where the furniture was, and then handed me a fake tracking number. I finally cancelled the order, demanded a refund and registered a complaint against them with the Better Business Bureau of San Francisco. Two days after the cancellation, they of course disregarded those instructions and shipped it anyway. Gee, if there’s one thing most customers just love, it’s being completely ignored.
Solution: Drink Myself Sideways and Watch the Wonderful Jimi Mistry in A Funny Disaster Flick
So while waiting for the armoire to meander across the entire United States on a pack mule, I drank myself into a fine buzz with a few more glasses of Garnacha de Fuego while watching “2012”. Even tipsy, it was one of the silliest movies I ever saw, although it had two bright spots amidst the plethora of plagiarized plots, ridiculously excessive CGI (not to mention completely inaccurate Mayan cultural history and ignorance of basic high school level aerodynamics): Woody Harrelson was a delightful hoot as a crazed conspiracy theorist who happened to get one (final) conspiracy right, and the perpetually under-utilized and multi-talented Jimi Mistry (really enjoy his “Lost in …” mix series on Sound Cloud) was the scientist who set the plot in motion. It wasn’t that Jimi had a great role; just that I was glad to see him again, even if they did have him spouting dialog in yet another faux Indian accent - when he was born and raised in Great Britain and speaks a better Queen’s English than I do. (I, on the other hand, speak a New York English which is a far cry from anything intelligible, except to another New Yorker.) I don’t know how he stands it.
Also started reading The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, the choice of which was NOT as a result of Hugo Chavez handing President Obama a Spanish copy as a gift, but was a B&N recommendation for having read Hiram Bingham’s Lost City of the Incas. I would encounter all of the press coverage of the gift later. My favorite review? The Wall Street Journal’s laughingly self-serving review of a book which excoriates capitalism, calling it “THE IDIOT’S BIBLE!” – the term derived from the commentary of three South American journalists, known for a political affiliation which I’m guessing could be loosely defined as “NOT LEFTIST”. The WSJ didn’t dispute any of his statistics or argue any of his historical facts, however – just called everyone who read the book an idiot. Wow. There’s an intelligent book review for you. Well, what else could you expect from the Wall Street Journal?
My second favorite cache of political commentary came from all those fine folks who equated Obama graciously accepting the gift as a sign that he was in fact a secret communist. The fact that he was handed a Spanish version of the book and told Chavez he hadn’t read it before deterred them not an whit. Apparently, the mere fact that he was polite and gracious – as opposed to punching Chavez in the nose and kicking him up and down a flight of stairs in full view of an international battery of television cameras – was indisputable proof that he was a secret communist in their minds. Ahhh, the pitiable lack of logic and common sense in the American people’s – and the Wall Street Journal’s - thought processes is just sad, sometimes.
In any event, at least so far, Galeano hasn’t written anything startling and new that hasn’t already been an accepted part of the South American historical curricula for decades now … although he probably wrote it in a more poetic and passionate fashion than other authors of drier textbooks … did no one in this country actually stay awake through their American history courses? True, I haven’t finished the book yet – maybe he turns insane in the last 100 pages or something. Although I suspect that some people enjoy screaming like hysterical banshees and advocating book burning just for the fun of it.
Grouchy Brits And Speaking of Romanticizing the Bedroom …
Even though we weren’t, I have to salute the Art & Frame Source on Osgood Street, North Andover: one of the few businesses in the Andovers run by people with working brains, above average customer service and a great sense of humor. Not only was the woman willing to see if she could track down a print of Nicolas Poussin’s 1627, “Nymph with Satyrs” from the National Gallery of London for me (the same painting you’re looking at on this journal page), she also peered at just the small thumbnail j-peg of it and announced, “She’s not sleeping, she’s in ecstasy!” - I yelled “THANK YOU!” at the top of my lungs and scared her half to death. But when she read the National Gallery of London’s puritanical description of the work and burst out laughing at it too – I knew I’d found a kindred spirit. Made my whole day. Turned out she was able to locate it, has it on order and we’ll mat and frame it when it arrives in a few weeks. Can’t imagine a more romantic print for the bedroom. No wonder the British are so grouchy, if they look at that painting and think of sleeping. They obviously have no fun at all.
So while we waited for nymphs and satyrs, the awesome Caesar Borgia swept dramatically across the country … in another box. I’d finally decided that he’d be gracing the wall behind the computer instead of Underdog, along with my pitiful collection of “certificates of achievement”. Difficult choice, but Caesar was definitely more pleasurable – albeit somewhat distracting - to look at while sitting at my computer (sorry, Underdog).
When I raised him up on the wall, he definitely looked striking up there. Didn’t even have to measure the wall – there was already a nail hole up there I hadn’t seen before I could use as a reference. And I especially liked the fact that his gaze was turned towards the wealth corner – as though he on one side of the room was lending his intensity of purpose and strong will to the other side. Which was fine by me.
No comments:
Post a Comment