IKEA

What can I say about it that isn't already funny. It's like an Asian grocery- "ooh, look at this bag of dried quids". Like a inner city wig store- "try on 'Chakka' next!". Like the Moroccan bazaar at EPCOT-" look! the gigantically curly-toed slippers I've been looking all over for." The Scandinavian aesthetic has that appeal of being other-worldly. Lingonberry? Prast? With so many novel things to entertain themselves, you'd never guess their suicide rate would be so high. I suppose a lack of sunlight for chunks of the year is to blame. It always cheers me up a bit to shop for home furnishings. It must lighten their mood to bring a touch of ergonomy to trivets and magazine racks. I'll pass on most of the furniture, though. Chairs are either ingenious or they are comfortable, rarely both. And I think we've probably all learned our lesson about bureaus made out of newspapers and glue. It would take more Aquavit than I can get past my nose to come close to falling asleep on one of their mis-sized platform beds. But the sheer novelty of the highly-colored plastic whatsits will keep me coming back. Whether or not I will ever sit down to a game of ice cube tic-tac-toe is secondary to owning the trays that would make it a possibility. (a good 'snow day and the furnace isn't working' activity, could happen) And who is immune to the charm of a red spatula? No one I know with fifty cents in their pocket! I remember my first trip through IKEA, without children. The high-concept worked on me like a drug. First, the showrooms; the seductive balance of line, color, and texture in bite after little bite. Get your tiny pencil ready! Next, the interactive melee of sofa bouncing and drawer pulling; free rein to the kind of behavior that would make a 'sales associate' at Ethan Allan blanch (from afar). By the time you'd hit the Marketplace, any sense of restraint would evaporate. If you had somehow gotten there from the wrong direction, the anxiety over not being able to locate a shopping cart would be almost too much to bear. Even waiting in line to check out created the feeling of it all being over too soon. "Let's do it again!" With children it's almost the same experience except, with a new window of opportunity opened up by the only instance of entirely free baby-sitting I know of, it happens at warp speed. Showrooms are for dreamers. Pulling on an expertise at Chutes and Ladders, I am able to customize my path through the Marketplace all the way to 'scratch and dent' with just enough time to shop in the allotted forty-five minutes. (Once we even waited for them to page us before going back for the kids, tee hee) This last trip we shopped with an eleven-year-old who's now too tall for free baby-sitting. &*#! He was trying to work us for a piece for furniture that experience has taught me would have been destroyed in ten minutes. We bought him off with a sticky bun the size of his head. I realize there's less to it all than meets the eye, that I'm being manipulated into creating a sales receipt as long as my arm, and that I'm leaving the store with bags and bags of what, melted down, would constitute a $100. brick that could fit in my glove compartment. But the genius of the store is that the experience of buying oven mitts elevates them beyond their utility. Some guy out there with too many vowels in his name has really thought about shelf brackets. We have to trust the Swedes to invent colorful objects that ward off the grayness of the day-to-day that threatens to swallow us. And really, you can't get a lamp at a better price.