Gepetto, I'm a Real Boy

This is going to sound like the most obnoxious of all connections. I know that. But in the spirit of confessing ridiculous and embarrassing things to the world (or at least the 2.5 readers of this blog), here goes.

Sometime in the next 36 hours, my long awaited, much-researched and agonized over, perfect sofa arrives. Below, what it will look like, sort of (courtesy of the Room and Board website):


I say "sort of" because I ended up ordering it in a different fabric. Following two months of ordering samples and showing them to everyone I knew. And that was after two months of visiting every furniture store in Urbania, and a trip to the big city to check out Design Within Reach. And that was after hating our current sofa for two years.

So, I've invested a lot of time and energy into this single construct whose job is simply to hold my big fat ass when I want to watch television. Too much, surely. But for some reason, it felt like a monumental decision. How could I get it to match the curtains? Why is everything overstuffed and floral, or weirdly contemporary? Didn't anyone watch old fifties movies? Where were the damn tightbacks? More than simply an aesthetic challenge, however, I think there's something bigger going on. Basically, I equate furniture with maturity. As in, I woke up this morning and thought: "the sofa is coming tomorrow. I'm finally going to be an adult."

Yes, yes, I know. What the hell is that?! I have no idea how this connection got forged in my brain. Welcome to the wide world of commodity fetishism. Intellectually, I get that, and yet I can't deny that I get a frisson of innocent pleasure from the fact that this is the first piece of new furniture I've ever bought. We inherited our current couch from friends at a previous institution. Let's assume that they'd had it for five years, and that we've been imprinting our own ass grooves on it for the last four. It probably goes without saying that it's showing signs of wear. [As in saggy and stained and the biggest scratching posts the cats have ever had the pleasure of defacing.] While it was very comfortable (a snooze-inducer for sure) and did good service, it was never the color or shape that I would have picked. Unlike new couch, which is as close to making my own as I could get. So apparently it's the combination of aesthetic choice and newness that mean signify adulthood to me. I suppose there are worse definitions.

The arrival of the couch will dovetail nicely with another atavistic set of self-definers. Sometime after the sofa arrives (I hope), we'll be hosting our summer reading group. That means that today, I'm off to the grocery store and back in time to clean the house. For no good reason that I can discern (except perhaps 30 years of social conditioning), I can't help but think that being a good cook with a clean house is a crucially important indentity to occupy. Do you think that Gloria Steinem makes house calls?