Online furniture shopping is a funny thing. Buying furniture is possibly one of the most personal tasks one can take on, perhaps short of underwear shopping (I would argue that furniture shopping is even more personal than clothes or car shopping, since clothes are changed everyday, and we probably spend proportionately more of our time at home than in our automobiles). Yet the inherent anonymity and distance one takes on in any online transaction means that there is a built-in paradox to the whole project.

Nonetheless, given that the closest Ikea is an 8-hour drive, and the inherently tiny frame of Tiffany, I made the plunge and went about the painful task of seeking, online, to fill my empty apartment with more than just boxes.

Today, the firstfruits of my labor (okay, labor may be overstating the case) arrived, in discrete packages, courtesy of UPS (there are more to come, but they seem to follow a Poisson process). I now have three boxes of incredibly disassembled furniture, to be converted to usable objects for the apartment.

Ikea furniture is really Lego for grownups. You try to piece the 5 million pieces together, using assorted widgets, and try to discipher the pictoral instructions (yes, literally, cartoons) and wonder whether it would be easier if they just gave the damn instructions anyway. Isn't there a superior way of communicating to me which is the top end of the given sideboard with five unevenly-spaced holes aligned in a particular pattern? I mean, seriously.

On the bright side, I now have two trestle legs for my desk (no desktop yet) and a bedside table (with a drawer assembled after much toil and frustration). More to follow.