Armchair therapist

As you can see from the totally undoctored photo above, I have an awesome roommate. Every day is an amazing adventure involving journeys into wild frontiers where we battle laser-shooting aliens or bears or zombies or zombie alien bears with eye lasers…you get the point. My roommate is cool and I’d be hard pressed to think of anyone else, with whom I could maintain such comfortable living arrangement. Sure, sometimes I get exploded in the process (and yes, I just wrote that I “get exploded”…shut up) but that’s a small price to pay, I suppose.

Lately (and by lately, I mean for like the past 6 months), we have been toying with the idea of re-doing our living room. It’s not exactly as exciting as space battles, but equally necessary nonetheless. We have a serious lack of seating, which sometimes hinders our capabilities for hosting events. Events like parties. I want to have a party so bad, but I’m on “Party-Verbot” until we get a new sofa.

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Though the solution to this quandary seems obvious (Step 1: Buy sofa), it hasn’t been that easy at all. This has left me virtually partyless for the majority of the summer. The summer that is pretty much just over. Nobody wants to have parties anymore. There’s the occasional “sit-around-and-drink-beer” gathering, but that’s different. We’ve also been invited to a few weddings, but that’s different too. A wedding party is more of a “celebration of your love” type thing (all well and good), whereas a party party is a “celebration of your love of beer and dancing like an idiot and playing air guitar with a folding chair” (much more entertaining and you don't have to dress up).

I can’t have a party until we have a new sofa. We can’t buy a sofa until we find one that matches the particular size specifications for our living room. Additionally, Schmidt and I have completely opposing viewpoints with regards to what constitutes a comfortable piece of furniture (he likes firm, leather upholstery and I like soft fabrics). On top of all of that, sofas are completely fucking expensive if you get them from any other place aside from IKEA, which we can’t because everything there is either too ugly or of too shitty quality for Schmidt’s tastes.

As for my tastes… I don’t fucking care. Schmidt wants to find something that we can both agree on, but that has proven to be near (if not entirely) impossible, since we are on opposite sides of the sofa spectrum. He wants/needs somewhat homogenous, faux-Oriental furniture made of materials that will last a minimum of 25 years of daily usage. And I need a place to rest my ass when I’m watching a movie on our wall. “Can I sit on it?” and “Does it clash terribly with other pieces of furniture?” those are my top requirements and everything else is just kind of extra.

This might make Schmiddy seem awfully high-maintenance, but he’s really a very simple guy. He just wants to cross off buying furniture for the next quarter of a century from his to-do list, that’s all.

Say we were to make a list of the Top 200 Things That Schmidt Can’t Stand (#1 being “the worst”, #200 just “bad”). Number 1 on the list would be “The General Human Population of the Planet Earth” and numbers 2-100 would be subsets of characteristics of the general human population of the planet Earth, ranging from annoying behavioral traits (e.g. unpunctuality) to physical traits that gross him out (e.g. pointy noses and “monkey thumbs”) to things people basically need to do to stay alive, but that he can’t stand anyway (e.g. pooping). Numbers 100-200 would be comprised of “lesser” offenses that he actually spends just as much of his time thinking about (e.g. #175: “I can’t stand how you can see all of the cables running underneath the table with the turntables” or #200: “I can’t stand how Brooks hasn’t painted over the small chips in the wall that she accidentally knocked out while retrieving the vacuum cleaner”).

I accept him how he is, because he accepts me the way I am. I haven’t painted over those chips in the wall because … well, I never really think about them until I go get the vacuum cleaner. And then again just now as I was blogging, but that doesn’t count.

In the end, it’s just much easier for me to let him have his “fun” and get something that he finds acceptable. When he’s satisfied, then he’s a lot less complainy about how the world and everyone and everything in it sucks, which in turn makes me happier. So, if you think about it, I won't be paying 1000+ Euros in monthly installments for a sofa. I’d be paying 1000+ Euros in monthly installments for peace of mind.

Also, a party.