We Asked For It

Figure I: "Fate has me highly skilled and loaded with talent." -Vince Vaughn, "The Break-Up"
Figure II: My bag of tricks

So, Ikea. Again.

As the saying goes- fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

The thing this- we were not fooled, we just ARE fools. We awoke on Sunday morning, the subject of going to New Jersey levitating over us as we had our coffee and cereal, and finally the decision was made.

We would go.

Dragging RM by the heels- KR and I led onward to the Port Authority. We got on the bus, and 40 minutes later were dropped off in front of the Swedish furniture and meatball-making house of horrors. It was even more chaotic and crowded than I remembered- if that’s even possible.

We had a list of what we needed, and having made mistakes the last time, we crept our way through the store with the rest of the herd determined to make our trip as short as possible. A desk, a bedside table, an ottoman and a dresser later, we realized that we would be requiring a plan B for returning home. And that is when renting a car became a viable option.

Lucky for the millions who are car-less in the Tri-State area, Ikea has a rental car company situated right inside the exit doors. So when you’re desperately wheeling your huge cardboard boxes into the freezing cold, you have the option of breaking down and paying the $85 because you're under the age of 25.

And who even has a map of New Jersey? Not I. Not KR, and definitely not RM, who was the driver-elect. Lucky for us, though, we and our furniture made it through the Lincoln Tunnel unscathed.

The hitch in the giddy-up was the fact that the Kia had to be returned to New Jersey the same day, or else we would be charged more for dropping it off in Manhattan, or we would be charged for keeping it an extra day. How very inconvenient.

So to Manhattan we went to haul the furniture upstairs, and back to New Jersey we fled, wanting to make it back before the 6 PM bus left. There was a small altercation with a man and his P.A. system, but we lost him somewhere under a bridge headed to Jersey City.

Sunday night we went to dinner in our neighborhood, then to see 27 Dresses. It received our high approval rating- probably because of all the weddings going on with friends our age these days.

Monday morning we woke up to face the music of all the long skinny boxes lining the even longer and skinnier hallway that stretches the length of our apartment. Alright, so we woke up at 11:15 and the day got started a little late- don’t hate me because my employer celebrates National holidays.

I bought RM a latte got him to join me at Best Buy- which wasn’t hard seeing as he stared in awe at the wall of huge televisions watching old college football highlights while I was on the phone with my Dad, asking which to purchase. He took advantage of racking up points on his Best Buy reward cards as I paid, which made me feel better about asking him to carry it home.

We got down to business assembling furniture (with the help of the $9.99 toolkit purchased at Ikea) and may have actually finished assembling everything we purchased. We were all so proud, too. AV and AV II got back from running errands and I was so eager to show them what I had made- talk about creating a new sense of self worth. You would have thought I was a newly potty-trained toddler.

We hammered and nailed things and finished in time for our reservation at Butter- an NYC celebrity-spotting haven… or so we read about the next morning. While we were enjoying our pea soup and osso buco, courtesy of Restaurant Week, we kept a shrewd eye out for anyone noteworthy. The music was well-selected and the food was rich, but I left with little more than a matchbook and the sinking feeling that my nice long weekend was winding down.

Imagine my surprise when Kristen sent me a link to a celeb-spotting website Tuesday, confirming that Giselle and Tom were seen dining a few tables away from Leonardo Di Caprio Monday night.

At Butter.

“Should we have stayed home and thought of here?”
- Elizabeth Bishop