Girlfriend Moving Madness
Last weekend, I discovered that my girlfriend is insane.
Granted, I've always had my suspicions that Melissa is insane, primarily because she's dating me, but it wasn't until I helped her move into a new apartment that I realized the true depths of her insanity.
To be fair, I really didn't have to move much of anything because Mel had conducted most of the moving during the week, and my weekend moving duties mostly centered around cleaning and maintenance. Truth be told, I would rather have been involved with the manly art of furniture and box moving instead of cleaning and maintenance, but whatever.
My primary function was to put together the new furniture items she bought specifically for her new apartment, the pre-fabricated K-Mart specials that are the staple furniture pieces for people from age 18 through, roughly, age 38. I'm now 28 years old, and I've owned and constructed enough particle board furniture to furnish a small third world country. In other words, I was the right man for the job.
My first furniture construction challenge was a wine rack. Now, I had never before put together a wine rack, but now that I have a wine rack under my belt, I can truthfully state that wine should simply be stacked on the floor because that would save mankind the irritation of putting together a wine rack.
I won't bore you with the details of the wine rack construction, except to say I let fly with more expletives than most sailors can utter in a lifetime. Melissa loved the finished wine rack. She loved it so much, in fact, that she spent the next half hour painstakingly positioning kitchen appliances so as to show off the wine rack. I should note here that Mel is an interior design student, so she lives on a different planet than the rest of us.
"I don't like the microwave there, because you can't see the wine rack from the sink," she said.
"Is it that important to be able to see the wine rack when doing dishes?" I asked, and she looked at me like I just defecated on the floor.
"Well, obviously, you just don't get it," she huffed, and then she spent the next 20 minutes placing, and removing, and replacing, bottles of wine on the wine rack until they looked "just right."
Rather than question her strange wine bottle positioning technique, I busied myself with the next construction project, this time a heavy bookshelf.
Now, the bookshelf would have been a quick construction job, except that Mel kept borrowing the only screwdriver in the house so she could hang curtain rods. I'm not exactly sure why curtain rods became so important all of a sudden but, to her, hanging curtains rods had become a life or death situation akin to duct taping for a terrorist attack.
Again, rather than question her motives, I simply sat quietly and waited for her to finish with the curtain rods so I could finish with the bookshelf. Once completed, I moved the bookshelf against the appointed wall, and Mel immediately started stacking books strategically on the bookshelf. Once it was crammed with books, she stepped back and assessed the situation.
"The bookcase needs to be moved to the right about two inches," she said.
Did I mention the bookcase was heavy? And it was heavy even without two tons of books, so moving it, even a measly two inches, was a task even Hercules would pass on.
"Do you have any idea how heavy this thing is?" I protested as we both grunted and groaned and tried to move the beastly thing two inches across carpet. "Can't we just leave it where it is?"
Again I got the floor defecation look, so I scuttled into the kitchen to grab a glass of water and to look at the wine rack. When I returned, Mel was (you guessed it) removing books from the bookcase so she could move it two inches to the right.
Then, much to my amazement, she started hanging a picture near the bookcase and she asked me to hold it up so she could eyeball it. I did as instructed, but I made the unforgivable sin of (get ready) holding it too high.
"Don't hold it so high!" she scolded. "It has to be even with the top of the bookcase!"
By the end of the weekend, I was pretty much resigned to being wrong all the time. Mercifully, it will be about two weeks before we'll be able to see each other again.
Hopefully she'll be done moving herself in by then.
Posted by Ryan at April 3, 2003 11:16 AM
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