Tomorrow!

Styro's coming to see me tomorrow. I could only be more beside myself with excitement if my friend Styro were coming to... WAIT!

Since most of our ten-day schedule consists of binge drinking, the majority of my preparations have revolved around making sure my toilets are clean and huggable. Although I did also print her a perky little business card that reads "Hi, my name is Styro! I live at [address]! If you call [number] someone will come and get me shortly. I apologize if I've been a drunken inconvenience or if I've sullied your coat." Yeah. And I had the card laminated because it's entirely possible she'll have to refer to it on more than one lost occasion. It's wash-n-wear. I'm just that good a hostess.

In light of the fact that Styro is going to need some consistent place to lay her head down after all the poison, it became increasingly necessary to complete the "the office to no, like an ACTUAL OFFICE" room transition. Not because I'm ashamed to have a bunch of random six-year-old crap lying around, not because I'm embarrassed that there's an entire room at the back of the house we'd rather deny than clean out, but because I'm sincerely concerned that my friend might very well suffocate in there. Even standing up. And don't quote me, but I'm almost positive we don't have "Friend to Obscene Yarn Blanket Suffocation" coverage on our homeowners'. I'll ask Randy but I'm pretty sure.

OFFICIAL "TOTN,LAAO" SCHEMATIC:

STEP 1: Go to IKEA.

STEP 2: Remind Randy, the king of going IN the OUT door, that there's a whole showroom upstairs, you don't have to select what you want from the fucking identical brown box warehouse.

STEP 3: Find a reasonably-sized desk.

STEP 4: Find a reasonably-sized bookcase.

STEP 5: Tear up aisle and bin number of reasonably-sized bookcase when you happen upon The Bookcase Of Your Dreams. Celebrate when you learn that there's one in stock, that the Library of Congress didn't take them all.

STEP 6: Purchase all of the above; get boxes inside house.

STEP 7: In a clandestine move to thwart his insurance carrier, Randy has surprise rotator cuff surgery. Again. While theatrically flipping the end-of-the-year bird to Blue Cross / Blue Shield (with a humbly reconstituted right arm, thank you) he succeeds in simultaneously flipping it to me, the girl with a newly blanketless (read: harmless) room full of brown IKEA boxes, and apparently no helpers.

I guess the Library of Congress must maybe hire a guy or something, because assembling this bookshelf was a goddamned algebraic equation. I don't know that for a fact because I failed algebra twice, but since algebra's the one with all the angles and the shelves and the books and shit I took a pitiful conjecturer's stab. Anyway. I got it all together. And though Randy fundamentally knows that putting me in charge of assembling a room full of IKEA furniture is tantamount to asking me to teach my parents how to configure a wireless network, I reckon the Vicodan must have eased his structural mind. And also eased his sense of allowable style, since I seem to have buzzed in this shelf under his aesthetic decorum radar.

Oh yes. It's a Day of the Dead shelf. Dia de los Muertos, as I understand it. A whole shelf. That's a devil chicken artfully -- and evilly-- suspended by a picture hook. And some bobble-headed skeleton sunbathers consolidated with some pale bony ballet dancers. Think it's tasteless? Well, go sit in the family room then, dick. See what kind of relief that brings****.

Given that this gigantorm shelf was designed to carry the weight of many, many historical American documents, however, and given that I have the rudimentary building skills of a Yoplait yogurt cup, Randy understandably had a couple of structural integrity questions.

"So you screwed the bracket on?"

"Well yeah. Do you see a bracket leftover anywhere?" [ Scan room for anything immediately unrecognizable, i.e.; apparently a "bracket"]

"And you secured the bracket into...."

"The... bookshelf."

"Right. But you secured it to..."

"The... bookshelf."

"Right. But the other end. You screwed that into...."

"The chair? Or no, the desk!"

"The wall."

"Well obviously the wall, doy."

No. Not the wall. How? How would I... nevermind. You don't have degrees in algebra.

So really my only point here was to give Styro a heads up; you're gonna want to move that cot I set up for you in the office up against the far wall. Or into the hallway. And possibly out into the yard, I don't know. Maybe when you get here you can do the algebraic algorithm and figure it out for sure. My parents can help; they're currently working with a wireless network made up of thirteen large paperclips, an infrared mouse and a tangerine. So they've got time.

**** P.S. A shot of a shelf in the family room. Hey, and FYI? Some kind of bitey spider is breeding in the couch, I don't know. Just don't lie down. And if you accidentally lie down, don't for the love of God fall asleep.

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