Feb 08 2009
More Evils of Banality
Wow. This whole blog-thing is getting so confessional. Whatever.
- The pilgrimage to the holy shrine of all mid-30′s-middle-income-urban-parents today. That’s right: the Blue and Gold Temple of IKEA. We picked up a shelving unit for babygirl’s room. IKEA is not unlike the Catholic Church. When you’re actually there, it’s a mild and almost anodyne experience, during which you feel virtually nothing. Both have the clearly defined ritual paths and behaviors, designed to slow and pacify a gathering crowd. Both have the serial repetitions: The Lord be with you…and also with you…We lift up our hearts…We lift them up to the Lord…Should we get some new dishtowels?…Do we need them?…The old ones are getting kinda grungy…OK, let’s do it. But most of all, like the Catholic Church, the true pain of Ikea – like searing, lingering guilt – never hits until you get home, and have to build the damn thing. The problem with IKEA is not the instruction sets; they’re actually remarkably clear. Like Catholicism, you always know what you’re doing wrong. The problem is that you do wrong despite knowing it’s wrong, because the thing, the shelving unit in this case, makes it damn near impossible to do it right. Which is to say, it is precisely like the Catholic moral system: personal failure is a feature, not a bug. Why, I ask you, must a system designed for DIY construction be organized such that a half-millimeter error would make its construction impossible? Oh, God of IKEA, we are merely human, with all these human faults! So we spent the afternoon in sin and penance (and more penance than sin, but that’s always the way…), but ended up with a pretty nifty shelving system. Irony? It’s called the Expedit. They need to expedite the building process.
- I find it odd that both she and I have male first cousins who live in Boston and have visual arts careers (photographer, film-maker). Neither of them is from Boston. I sometimes imagine that they’re the same guy, which weirds me a little. It’s also true that we hardly ever speak to either of them, though not for lack of desire. I think I’ve seen my cousin twice in ten years.
- The shelving unit is part of the preparation for the babybelly. Don’t ask me how; it’s not the point. We’d done the equivalent of jack squat to prepare for the arrival of the babybelly until about two weeks ago, when we were like, “Oh, shit…we’re gonna have another baby in less than 90 days!” Well, yeah. Maybe we should get off our asses and get our shit together vis-a-vis the impending arrival of another human being (and a very needy one) in our home. Last time around, we were uber-prepared by now, but we see now that the whole preparation thing then was really first-time-at-the-rodeo sort of behavior. This ain’t our first rodeo. So, all things considered, I think we’re at about the right mix of “Eh, it’ll all come together” and “We’re so screwed!” Plans are in the offing. Plans and lists. Lists and more lists.
- We’ve been watching the DVD’s for Season 1 and 2 of 30 Rock and we think it’s friggin’ hilarious. Alec Baldwin deserves every award he gets for that show. Double that for Tina Fey.
- We had yummy dinner courtesy of one of the best Vietnamese joints in Chicago, Pho Xe Tank, better known as just Tank Noodles. I worked in a Vietnamese restaurant some years ago, and we’ve made Vietnamese a pretty consistent staple of our diet ever since, so I know good Vietnamese food, and this is good. It’s located in what could be called the Little Vietnam section of Uptown (Broadway and Argyle), and it’s always, always packed. They must make a mint. In any case, I got the house pho (with the tripe, soft tendon, and all), while she got a nice beef dish (wrap it up with a ton of veggies in some rice paper, yums). The cha gio, of course, are mandatory. babygirl thought the nuac mam was too spicy, but she liked the cha gio. Tank does not eff around. I’m not sure these pictures convey the scale of the pho I got for $7. That’s a friggin’ salad bowl:
First, I was seriously impressed with your Ikea/Catholic Church analogy. And then I read that babygirl happily eats Vietnamese food. At which point, I keeled over in awe. Amazing. I might start printing pictures of other kids eating real food, to illustrate my kitchen and inspire my dino-nugget and spaghetti eating monsters. See, it is possible to try new things and survive! Look how happy she is!!
My only suggestion with Ikea is to buy things in sets…bookshelves, for example. Inevitably, you will screw up the first one – usually after spending an hour or so putting it together, with that damn little monkey wrench they throw in. But now you’re ready to do the second shelf/bookend so much quicker as you’ve learned from your mistake.
I should be more honest about the way babygirl “ate” the Vietnamese food. This is how it really happened. We placed some grilled beef, rice noodles, and a spring roll on her plate. She picked at the noodles for a while, likely because they looked like spaghetti, her favorite food. We cajoled her into trying the beef, which she chewed for three or four seconds before spitting it out. *she* then took half of babygirl’s spring roll and ate it: damned if it should go to waste. We finally convinced (that is, bribed) babygirl to try the second half of the spring roll, largely by promising a cookie for dessert. That is when the bargaining started: two bites? eight bites! three bites? seven! etc. But once she started eating the half a spring roll, she seemed to like it. So, I may have overstated her willingness to eat something other than spaghetti and pizza. It was a concession wrested from her with great difficulty and at significant cost to our cookie stash.
That Vietnamese food looks damn good. We can’t get that here in St. Cloud, MN…. Even the local Vietnamese restaurant doesn’t have it!!! (I suppose I could go to the Vietnamese grocery store and try to make it myself… yah, right.)
Anyway, now that I have a real job, I refuse to buy DIY kits like they sell at IKEA and Target. It’s REAL furniture from now on.
But a confession, I’ve never actually been inside an IKEA (a fact that grrrl-comrade finds almost impossible to comprehend, sinds she is devout IKEAn.)
Try spending about a grand a month for childcare and you’ll be back in Target in no time. Oh, that’s just for the one. That’ll be doubling at the end of *she’s* maternity leave in July. And infants cost more than potty trained kids. Yeesh.
I’ve got to agree with Sadaf — your Ikea/Catholic Church analogy is brilliant. As Steve mentioned earlier, I am a devotee of Ikea, if not a zealot; I believe my proselytizing is one of the reasons I can’t get him to go when we’re in the same city. Pretty sure he thinks it’s a fascist entity and wants nothing to do with it (about which he’s not entirely wrong)…but I’m not done trying to convert him!
As a show of my devotion, I was in NYC this past weekend to visit a cousin who just moved over there, and we travelled from Queens to Brooklyn on a weekend when the 7 train was being serviced just to go to the shiny temple. It was there that I might have spotted a high priest: it was a young, stocky man with a metal bowl from the a la carte kitchen section on his head.
With that said, I have yet to assemble the Boliden reading chair that I bought over a month ago for my new apartment. The fact that you were able to put together a shelving unit with both babygirl and babybelly in tow is simply remarkable.
And the Vietnamese food…yum. You’ve inspired a future lunch outing somewhere down here in downtown DC…
Your Pho was just named the #3 Pho by Time Out Chicago due to it’s “slightly greasy finish.” We should try the #1 ranked Pho 888 around the corner next time.