No matter how much they get mocked like in the movie "Five Hundred Days of Summer," where Joseph Gorden Levitt and Zoe Deschanel lie down on IKEA furniture, or the popular joke not to take your significant other to IKEA because it's where a big fight will happen (getting types of furniture appears to expose the couple's flaws and differences of opinion on things like color, type of wood, type of furniture they want to get), IKEA is an institution: the blue and yellow colors (coincidentally also the colors of the Ukraine flag, an often-seen symbol nowadays in defiance of Putin and Russia's advances against Ukraine), the Swedish meatballs, the popular showrooms that I like to wander around in dreaming that one day our home can be as well decorated as their rooms (or at least, as neat and without boxes lying around).
MJ has moved on to some other (higher-end, aka more expensive but also admittedly higher quality) brands of furniture for our new home, but she's still willing to visit old pastures at IKEA for particular shelves.....her favorite now is the roller shelf (IKEA name they give it is Novorasok, which sounds like the Russian city Novosibirsk, a major city on the Trans-Siberian highway) that has 3 layers, holds all kinds of stuff, and you can just wheel it away scott-free to another location within our home; if only all our troubles could just so magically be wheeled away. They're also pretty handy to use during moving, which we've done plenty of times and learned the hard way from.
There's one more institution of IKEA that sparks some joy at least temporarily: the assembly process. It's like a building-block exercise for adults who still crave the years of Lego and the sound of those pieces that go "click," (Lego also started in a Nordic country, Denmark, and Tetris was made by a Soviet software engineer, making me wonder if they have some expertise over in that area of the world to get people to enjoy building). Case in point, I just helped MJ assemble a "Novorasok" where the hardest part was pushing in a plastic screw into another screw to fasten in the wood pieces together, and it hurt my thumb to push the screw in as hard as I could, but it was all worth it when I got that satisfying "click" at the end of the push signaling that the screw fit in correctly, a sound of accomplishment, success, and passport to go onto the next step. Human beings all crave progress, and IKEA's "click" and its instructions providing step by step instructions really plays off our satisfaction at being able to follow even the simplest of steps. As someone who never worked well with his hands or did well in home economics or wood shop class, it gives me a cheap thrill to be able to assemble something, ANYTHING, that yields a usable product with utility. Even if my thumb hurts the next morning.
Also, I reiterate my stance on abolishing daylight savings time: MJ was reluctant to go to work at the hospital (more reluctant than she normally is) because there might just be an extra heart patient whose condition got just a little worse from having to switch clocks during daylight savings time and "springing forward," thus losing an hour. That losing an hour really is devastating; it's just like stocks; we're all happy to gain an hour or gain money, but that thrill dissipates easily, and is much outweighed by the agony of loss (of money in stocks) and of losing an hour, which we did this weekend. NOT WORTH IT!
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