All in a Good Night's Sleep

Settling

How long have I been here?
Friday night as I was getting ready to go out, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: I've graduated from college. I'm sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles. Hmmm. I had similar feelings after graduating from high school; I knew point A and point B, but the middle was all fuzzy. Even in retrospect the middle is fuzzy. How do we find ourselves where we are? These days I feel lazy. I don't write enough, and my excuse is that I have to feel "settled" before I can. To my credit, it took 3 weeks for all my boxes to arrive, and we are still in the process of furnishing the apartment. I even slack on the blog posts, and truthfully, when given some effort the blog is a good way to polish my personal essay abilities.

Bed

This Saturday my bed and I celebrated our one week anniversary. When I drove cross country I was accompanied by a red, twin size futon mattress that had been pilfered from CRC at the end of Junior year. This futon has been around (to put it lightly), but I thought it would be the best way to ensure a place to rest my head without being accompanied by a U-Haul full of furniture. I bought a foam mattress pad for said futon and slept on it, on the floor in my room, for all of a month before my hip went out 3 weeks ago. We'd gone to some party--a Northwestern party followed by an AFI party*--and I had come home drunk and slept on it wrong, ("it" being the futon as there is a proper and an improper way to sleep on shoddy bedding). I limped for 2 days as my hip was entirely fucked up. Based on this I decided to bite the bullet and buy a bed. Robert had done so a week earlier and dropped $375, something I was unwilling/unable to do. (Note here that I would opt not to share a bed with RFC3) Poor and in pain I turned to losangeles.craigslist for aid. I am not above used bedding as I have love for Lysol. I found a bed, but in order to transport it I would need the church van. You'll recall that I am currently working at a church in Pasadena as an "administrative assistant." However, there were problems getting the church van, and the man sold the bed. This sparked a freak out at the church which I may share in detail in another post. I continued my craigslist searchings and found new queen size mattresses listed at $169, which is roughly what I was looking at for a used queen size bed with a box frame. I called the number, "ask for so-and-so", and spoke with an Asian man who refused to tell me the location of his store. We haggled and I got the mattress, box-frame, metal wheels, and delivery for $215, brand new. I'm guessing my mattress is probably made out of sawdust and recycled playground woodchips, but my back no longer hurts and I'm open to shady deals so long as they're cheap.
Anyway, since acquiring the bed, I've been living in bed. I've never had a bed this big. I write in it, laptop in it, eat, watch tv, pay bills, pluck my eyebrows, and talk on the phone. There is a song from Hair that is constantly in my head these days. The song is definitely indicative of the amount of time I spend in my bed. We only got a sofa 3 days ago, which is probably why I sit where I sit. Said sofa was discovered outside on the corner along with our living room TV. (Days has been available via my little TV which was mailed to LA post haste). The sofa was kind of grody, but I soaked it in Lysol, Woolite Carpet Cleaner, and Deoderizer. Then I reapholstered it Saturday night while watching SNL. Tres chic, (pictures someday), and there is also a sofa bed inside that I Lysoled and vacuumed! My Grandmother always had an unhealthy appreciation for sofa beds, but now it's all starting to make sense...they're amazing! We have a coffee table from IKEA Robert has yet to build, and I found a free glass dining room table on craigslist. Hmm. Maybe we are settled?

Footnotes

As in this thing is in need of.
* Northwestern and AFI, I'm sure you were dying to know. The Northwestern Party was full of people I knew from NU but by face alone. Lots of theater '04 graduates. It looked like we were back in Evanston: awkward conversations, repressed emotions seeping through the drunkeness, and that NU quirkiness that in this case spawned a pre-Thanksgiving pilgrim and indian dress up party. Even out here amidst the NU Mafia there are cliques, and I was definitely feeling it at this gathering. I don't wish to name names, as the printed word has a way of biting one in the ass, but there are certainly some people (who were not necessarily in attendance at this gathering) that I could die happy never seeing again. If you must know you can ask me. In comparison the AFI party was very refreshing, but perhaps another extreme. The youthful, perhaps perpetual awkwardness of the purple crowd was traded for a slightly older, calmer party. Here I met a man who was kind, optimisitic, and clearly interested in me sexually. Okay. We talked, and he made the mistake of bringing up music, always a dangerous topic with me after working at WNUR, especially if you listen to crap, which I could tell he did. I tried to let him off by leaving it at "I listen to everything," at which point he immediately quipped, "do you like rap?"

Eyes on the Prize, M.F., Eyes on the Prize.