Frustrations with Furnishing Your Life

"There are 730,000 apartments on the island of Manhattan on 23 square miles of land. High rises, brownstones, tenements and condos. New ones being put up, and old ones being torn down. On the streets, we are all inhabitants of the same world, like it or not. And it doesn't take much to bring us together ... I think there are more people looking for love in this city than there are looking for apartments."
- Laura, ABC's "Six Degrees"

New Yorkers love to talk about how much they pay in rent. Well, I wouldn't say that we love to talk about it as much as we love to hate dealing with it. I've found that rent is generally in the top 10 things you learn about someone in the city when you first meet, and it's often the first question asked when one mentions what neighborhood he or she lives in.

I worked from home today while waiting for my new bookcase to be delivered. Oprah was on in the background as I sorted through emails and prepared my to do list for Monday when I overheard her mention that for the first time in history, there are more single women than married women in the United States. She was asking various twenty- and thirty-somethings on her show why they were still unmarried and how they felt about it.

Just as I was listening to a 27-year-old give Oprah all the reasons I would have mentioned, there was a knock on the door revealing that my bookcase had finally arrived. I say "finally" because this bookcase was sent back to the shipper (in Missouri) twice in the past month as a result of the general and consistent incompetence of FedEx.

If finding love in the United States or an apartment in New York City is tough, furnishing your own place (when you're single, work fulltime, have no car, no doorman and rely solely on delivery) ranks a close third.

Now I am trying to figure out how to arrange for FedEx to come back and pick up my bookcase since several of the pieces were damaged. A replacement from HomeDecorators.com is on the way, and Pottery Barn is also sending a new lamp because there is an electrical short in mine that occasionally blows my fuse box. More deliveries to figure out how to arrange on a weekday during business hours. Not to mention, I returned my mattress to 1-800-mattress back in December, and I ended up ordering from Sleepy's instead. I wonder how long the work-from-home-to-accept-furniture-delivery excuse is going to hold water.

There are certainly worse problems to be had, but I swear, I might post my desperate need for more furniture - so that I can finally unpack my last six boxes - on missed connections.

"I think she had a missed connection ... A missed connection, it's like the most romantic thing in the world, I check it everyday on craigslist. You know, if you see somebody on the street or in the subway and you almost say hello, but you don't or wish you did, and you desperately want to find them, you post it on missed connections."
- Whitney's assistant, "Six Degrees"