In The Closet
My room is not this big.
Walking through an Ikea, you move through smaller and smaller apartment style showrooms, all of them seemingly spacious and luxurious due to liberal use of Ikea products throughout. By the time you’re done you’re standing in a room the size of a dog kennel, but since there’s some modular cabinets and a framed picture of a fake family in there it feels like a suite at the Bellagio.
Yeah, you think, planning out a future in which every furnishing in your house has a quaint name with an umlaut in it. Clean, spare, and efficient. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.
Then you go to the Ikea warehouse and realize that in order to fill one room you’d need to spend at least a thousand dollars, and so instead you spend the day on Craigslist and cobble together a mismatched living room set for $45 which includes an ottoman that somebody’s dog got pregnant on.
Now, I find myself in the sort of situation that is Ikea’s bread and lingonberry butter – while I was in England and Hollywood, my roommates moved into our new place and discovered that instead of the four bedroom unit we’d been promised, it was a three bedroom unit with a glorified 10x10 closet. Since I wasn’t around to answer first when my roommates played a game of ‘One, Two, Three, Not It’ for the closet, it is now where I live like a lonely, jaded Harry Potter.
Admittedly, my closet has a window and a heat register and a smaller closet inside of it. It’s a ground floor room, the window is at eye level with no curtains, and the door doesn’t lock. It’s less a dwelling space and more a special tiny chamber designed by the Catholic church specifically to prevent masturbation from happening.
I’ve just reached a point where I’ve been able to successfully stow all my cardboard boxes full of stuff in my closet or under my desk, and I’m afraid that’s where they’re going to have to stay, because if I went so far as to unpack anything I really don’t think I have enough surfaces on which to put the things I’d taken out of the box.
Since getting back from LA I’ve just been pulling clean shirts and underwear out of my suitcase, but today I did laundry for the first time and I’m not sure where to put all my clean, folded clothes. The best idea I’ve had so far is to put it on my three tiered bedside table, which is the closest thing I have to a dresser. The advantage to that would be that I could get dressed without having to get out of bed, but since getting dressed is only something I do when I’m planning on getting out of bed anyway, it’s sort of a moot point.
Also, a room this small tends to get cluttered pretty quickly – all you have to do is set one thing down on the floor and right away 30% of the room is a complete mess. Since I tend to make a mess whenever I’m looking for something in my boxes and am always too lazy to pick it all up, my plan now is to simply mooch off my roommates whenever I need something rather than get it myself, because the very act of opening a box and taking two things out of it will make my room into an instant pigsty.
Today the good people at Sleep Country USA delivered the twin bed that I’d bought, which has done a lot to make my room look less like a slob lives there. Until then I’d been sleeping in a sleeping bag on a queen sized air mattress on the floor, which not only took up a lot of space but also put me far closer to the dusty, hairball and Astroturf laden hardwood floors than I wanted to be after a full day of band camp.
I’m sleeping in a twin bed in a tiny room. This takes me back to freshman year in the dorms, only there isn’t free food provided and at 2.1 miles from campus my house now is slightly closer to my classes than the Bean Complex was. Also, to my knowledge nobody here is crapping in a garbage can rather than walk to the bathroom, which is certainly one step above the dorms.
Truman Capps thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to write shorter updates during band camp.