Let's Talk About Chairs

I'm not feeling inspired, especially not in this awful space in which I am currently "working." My supervisor is on vacation, his office is being moved down the hall next week, and today when I got to work at 12:15 there were no computers at our desks and a student was carting filing cabinets out. There was no one else around on the fourth floor; what people I could see were behind closed doors in the conference room. It was ridiculous.

Now I have a loaner laptop from downstairs, an awkward Hewlett-Packard with a weirdly soft, matte finish and a terribly pale screen I can't focus on. (I am thankful for my Apple computer.) The fluorescent lights aren't actually buzzing above me, but it feels like they should be, and the copier is humming and tapping, although it's accompishing nothing. We have a nice view out our floor-to-ceiling windows, but the desks face us away from the windows and toward the hallway all day long. Outside is just an impermeable grey haze; better than the dull taupe of the pinboard in front of me, if only I could stare at it, but instead I have this LCD screen surrounded by aging office accessories.

I am fully aware that this is silly, ridiculous, unacceptable—but one reason I'm averse to the office-drone life path is that it is dressed in drab patterns of nothing colors, accentuated by bad lighting. That alone is a good reason to work at home. At home, my tiny desk is a clean, bright white. Sometimes I light candles at it and in the cocoon of warm darkness I try to write. I still need to hang my pastel map of Germany, alongside my new Ikea corkboard, lovingly decked out in postcards from Europe and other mementos. It's too small, but it fits where it needs to fit, and if I stay focused on corralling the clutter, I can work in the space.
My desk and chair in the old apartment.

Except I'm using my broken chair at the desk, because I need the two intact ones for the kitchen. The back has fallen off, because the screws don't screw into anything anymore, and I haven't stuffed the holes with toothpicks and glue yet like my father does because...I haven't. I want a slightly sturdier chair for my desk, so I can cross my legs on it and stay there longer. I want to put a chair there, and put a (fake?) sheepskin on top of it. Then all the cats will be so jealous while I blog away on my pile of softness, and my life will be so design-y.

I spent a long time making these collages on the PicStitch app on my phone, because it seemed like the easiest way. Please excuse the image quality; they're made of iPhone screenshots. I was really into the way they looked on the phone, but not so much on this huge 13" screen. I don't really like the white chair on the top, but it's a cheaper alternative to my top choice: the Tobias chair, the clear one on the right. It has a cantilever base like my parents' old chairs, for some sense of continuity in the chair collection, but it's comfy and wide. So wide, really, that it can fit a person much larger than I and might actually look silly tucked in under my tiny desk. It's also $80—a lot less than comparable non-Ikea chairs, but a lot for me.
I'm not sure why the coloring in the two collages is so different, but whatever. I did it all with my thumb and finger on my phone, so it's hard to complain. I like the idea of wood and sheep, or black and sheep, maybe, but I don't think these would be as comfortable. They're just wood chairs, and I don't know if the sheepskin will help with that. They're all cheaper than the Tobias chair, but also not free.

Maybe after Christmas I'll take a serious chair-shopping trip to the Ikea in Canton, and spend my gift money on one.

No comments: