I know that someday you'll find better things.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Ikea Art

“Why are you crying?”
“There’s so much, and it’s all so very beautiful… It’s so tragic… [sniffle, hiccup] We can’t have it all. How will we ever choose?”
“There, there… it will be okay. Are you at Ikea again?”


Every trip to Ikea is an emotional journey for me. It’s been this way from the very beginning of our relationship, Ikea and me. I used to go on these horrible and excessive benders—binging on purchases, hundreds of dollars worth, only to purge it all in the returns department in the days that followed when my sanity had returned and my guilt had all but consumed me.

Recovery has been a rocky road.
Itty bitty baby steps of self-discipline.

Phase 1: Lusting after the designer rooms and innovative organizational storage from the catalogue and safety of my own living room.

Phase 2: Spending a pre-determined amount of time wandering the upstairs showrooms, using my phone’s camera to capture all my favorite things, creating a little personal pinterest that I could look at whenever the next urge struck.

Phase 3: Bringing the children. That one was probably the most effective, since they suck the intimacy right out of most situations with the constant jabbering, question-asking, and whining. Most effective, but NOT the most fun.

Phase 4: Sticking to the list. This is the phase I’m currently in, and things have been pretty stable. There’s only one thing that can thwart it:

The art section.

How can I adequately describe my romance with the art section of Ikea? My heart rate increases just thinking about it.

A love-hate tide swells inside me the instant I arrive and evaluate my surroundings, and the excessive-compulsive battle begins. There’s so much, and it’s all so very beautiful. There are the enormous wall-covering canvases and the post-card-sized five-packs of quirky images and the many medium-sized things in between. And the frames! And the lovely relatively new addition of wall decals!

I used to employ a special recovery technique to resist the wiles of that seductive art section.

Bonus Phase: Conjuring great disdain for the travesty of commercially mass-produced artwork. Probably EVERYBODY has this poster/canvas/adorable sculpture now, so it’s not like it’s unique anyway. Why would you want to be like everyone else? Why would you want your living room to look like everyone else’s?

Alas, I couldn’t really sustain that one, no matter how hard I tried. It’s one of the few times that I haven’t been able to successfully lie to myself.

So tragic.
So very, very tragic.

Choosing is incredibly difficult, but I know I must use self-discipline. I limit myself to just one thing.

I usually end up getting at least three.

That’s just the way it is with Ikea art.

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