EPIC FAIL LOL (Just give me this one thing)

To date I've managed to accumulate about six pieces of furniture for my new apartment. The first is a small, round wooden table that serves as a desk and dining room table. But not at the same time, since it is roughly 2 or 3 feet in circumference and around 2 feet off the ground. The second is my futon, which remains unassembled due to missing parts (I appear to have forgotten the part that you sit on), so the futon mattress doubles as my bed. The third and fourth are a TV stand and a TV, the former of which serves as a sort of all-purpose flat surface storage area, and the latter of which sits silently in the corner for lack of a cable to connect it. The fifth piece is one of those camping chairs, and it waits in my bedroom until I feel like playing guitar. And, finally my nicest, most useful piece of furniture – one of those ergonomic office chairs.

I bought it while I was in Florida as an experiment in luxury. And also because I was having some minor back problems, perhaps as a result of living like a hipster, sitting on dumpster furniture, and working at my hipster desk on a folding chair. Who knows? Anyway, I’ve got a pretty nice office desk chair now, but I noticed a problem with it on the first day I arrived here at my new place: some of the screws were missing. No problem, said I, and I overcame that first obstacle by replacing them with some similarly sized screws I had from another piece of furniture. Luckily, they fit. But when I got the chair together it felt wrong. I decided not to do anything about it; maybe if I waited a bit it would go away. Problems do that, right?

Turns out the seat was on backwards. That is, the seat is supposed to slope down toward the front, so the chair allows your legs to sit naturally. Mine were being pushed gradually upward until they hit a weird lip at the front of the seat. I grasped this in a sort of eureka moment while making soup one evening and hurried to correct the problem. There’s not a lot to do in my apartment, honestly.

But it still didn’t feel right. The chair seemed to have a hard time leaning back, and my legs continually fell asleep whenever I sat down to eat soup on my little table.

Turns out the seat was on backwards. Again. This time, with respect to the legs. The top part of the legs has that little lever that allows you to adjust the height, and it also has a spring that lets your chair tilt a little backwards, but not a little forwards. Turns out I was tilting forwards, but I couldn’t tilt back. My attempts to lean back against the proper direction of the spring just cut off the circulation in my thighs, making my legs fall asleep.

So yeah, epic failure to construct one of the only useful pieces of furniture contained in my otherwise empty apartment. As it turns out, I built an anti-chair with no ergonomic properties that was probably worse for my health than a folding chair. That's gotta count as some sort of progress toward my evil genius status, right?

In other news, it’s incredibly cold and snowing! With wind chill, it’s probably in the low single digits, and it is really very windy outside. The power is sort of fluttering on and off at work, as it has been doing since yesterday. My landlord called to ask if any shingles had blown off my apartment (thankfully, none have), and the office heat apparently doesn’t work in my office. So here’s a song for the chilly winter. With apologies to Jake, who usually sings this live. I just wanted to try it! And I’m not very good at building chairs, so just give me this one thing, man. Just this one thing. Man.

Ben & Meredith - Born On the FM Waves (Against Me! cover) by seamonsters