Who Moved My Chair?
"If we get a bigger dining room table, what are we going to do with the little stainless steel on? It's still a great table."
"Maybe we could put it in the corner of the bedroom, to use as a little desk or something."
"Where the papasan chair is?"
"That's right."
And thus began the saga of the beginning of the end of the papasan chair.
I bought the chair in 2002 or so, at Urban Outfitters, in the perennial search for The Ultimate Comfortable Reading Chair(TM).
The papasan chair was certainly more comfortable for reading than the old butterfly chair which it sort of supplanted, but I finally had to face the truth: the only positions I can feel comfortable reading a book are 1) lying in the bed, 2) lying in the bath, and 3) lying on the floor.
No matter how strong my fantasies of curling up in a giant oversized chair with a book, the reality of tired arms, kinked neck, and kinked back just don't live up to the imagined version.
Thus the papasan chair became a dark, oversized denizen of my living room for many years.
With our move into the current townhome, the chair was relegated to a large unused corner of the bedroom, where it usually serves as a repository for clean-yet-unfolded, and/or only-worn-half-day-and-not-quite-dirty clothes. That's actually part of the issue with the chair's current location — it makes it just too convenient a dumping ground for clothes.
So, given a good plan for the chair's succession, it seemed the time had arrived for the chair to move on to a better place. This explains how, Thursday night, I was in the back of a Value Village offering to donate the chair, where I encountered a squinty, twitchy, weather-beaten old woman who looked like she'd kicked her drug habit just that morning, and was starting to feel the effects.
Value Village Woman: What you got there, guy?
Matt: It's a metal papasan chair. I don't have room for it anymore.
Value Village Woman: Well, let's see. Wait. Is that a cat hair over there?
Matt: Probably, but I could. . . .
Value Village Woman: You could nothing. We can't take that. It's probably got . . . cat germs and . . . piss and . . . shit and . . . [shudders a bit, and then calms herself back out of her frenzy] I didn't mean to say shit. But we can't take that piece of shit. Toss it.
Matt: Excuse me?
Value Village Woman: Toss it. Chunk it. You're not going to give that away.
She promptly turned around and went back into the Value Village.
I was so flustered, I didn't know what to do. I was also a little angry that Value Village doesn't offer a disposal service for the times they've so rudely refused something.
Later that night....
She: [just getting home from a late night at work] What's up?
I: I need to make a confession. A very environmentally irresponsible confession.
She: Oh?
I: [relates story of rude twitchy Value Village woman]
She: Wow. What a bitch. You should have thrown it in the Value Village dumpster.
I: I wanted to, since they were the ones who told me to toss it, after all, but they had the dumpsters all locked up behind a fence. Probably precisely for that reason.
She: You should have just left the chair by their back door then. If they're going to talk to you that way.
I: Yeah, well, I was afraid they'd videotape me and hunt me down, but I was also afraid if I took the chair back home, it would just serve as a visual reminder of how I was so . . . verbally . . . violated by that woman. So I . . . just . . . well, let's say it found its way into some innocent business's dumpster it probably shouldn't have gone into. Is that terrible?
She: I think that's okay.
And thus we were done with the chair. And we thought that was the end of the story.
Until this afternoon. When Ivan the cat was pacing strangely around the now empty corner of our bedroom near my closet. The place which, until a couple of days before, the big papasan chair had occupied. Suddenly we both knew what we'd done:
"Oh no, that was. . . ."
"Um, yeah, I know."
"That was Ivan's chair."
"We threw away Ivan's chair."
"What have we done? Do you think he'll forgive us?"
You see, we hadn't actually sat in the chair in ages, but that didn't mean nobody had been.
It didn't take Ivan too long to come up with an alternate solution, however, and despite my worries about getting cat hair all over every article of clothing I own, I just couldn't in good conscience kick him out. You see, it seems that he's found a new favourite chair in roughly the same northeast bedroom sector.
That's right. My closet. But I'm the jerk who threw his chair away. What is there to do?
"Maybe we could put it in the corner of the bedroom, to use as a little desk or something."
"Where the papasan chair is?"
"That's right."
And thus began the saga of the beginning of the end of the papasan chair.
I bought the chair in 2002 or so, at Urban Outfitters, in the perennial search for The Ultimate Comfortable Reading Chair(TM).
The papasan chair was certainly more comfortable for reading than the old butterfly chair which it sort of supplanted, but I finally had to face the truth: the only positions I can feel comfortable reading a book are 1) lying in the bed, 2) lying in the bath, and 3) lying on the floor.
No matter how strong my fantasies of curling up in a giant oversized chair with a book, the reality of tired arms, kinked neck, and kinked back just don't live up to the imagined version.
Thus the papasan chair became a dark, oversized denizen of my living room for many years.
With our move into the current townhome, the chair was relegated to a large unused corner of the bedroom, where it usually serves as a repository for clean-yet-unfolded, and/or only-worn-half-day-and-not-quite-dirty clothes. That's actually part of the issue with the chair's current location — it makes it just too convenient a dumping ground for clothes.
So, given a good plan for the chair's succession, it seemed the time had arrived for the chair to move on to a better place. This explains how, Thursday night, I was in the back of a Value Village offering to donate the chair, where I encountered a squinty, twitchy, weather-beaten old woman who looked like she'd kicked her drug habit just that morning, and was starting to feel the effects.
Value Village Woman: What you got there, guy?
Matt: It's a metal papasan chair. I don't have room for it anymore.
Value Village Woman: Well, let's see. Wait. Is that a cat hair over there?
Matt: Probably, but I could. . . .
Value Village Woman: You could nothing. We can't take that. It's probably got . . . cat germs and . . . piss and . . . shit and . . . [shudders a bit, and then calms herself back out of her frenzy] I didn't mean to say shit. But we can't take that piece of shit. Toss it.
Matt: Excuse me?
Value Village Woman: Toss it. Chunk it. You're not going to give that away.
She promptly turned around and went back into the Value Village.
I was so flustered, I didn't know what to do. I was also a little angry that Value Village doesn't offer a disposal service for the times they've so rudely refused something.
Later that night....
She: [just getting home from a late night at work] What's up?
I: I need to make a confession. A very environmentally irresponsible confession.
She: Oh?
I: [relates story of rude twitchy Value Village woman]
She: Wow. What a bitch. You should have thrown it in the Value Village dumpster.
I: I wanted to, since they were the ones who told me to toss it, after all, but they had the dumpsters all locked up behind a fence. Probably precisely for that reason.
She: You should have just left the chair by their back door then. If they're going to talk to you that way.
I: Yeah, well, I was afraid they'd videotape me and hunt me down, but I was also afraid if I took the chair back home, it would just serve as a visual reminder of how I was so . . . verbally . . . violated by that woman. So I . . . just . . . well, let's say it found its way into some innocent business's dumpster it probably shouldn't have gone into. Is that terrible?
She: I think that's okay.
And thus we were done with the chair. And we thought that was the end of the story.
Until this afternoon. When Ivan the cat was pacing strangely around the now empty corner of our bedroom near my closet. The place which, until a couple of days before, the big papasan chair had occupied. Suddenly we both knew what we'd done:
"Oh no, that was. . . ."
"Um, yeah, I know."
"That was Ivan's chair."
"We threw away Ivan's chair."
"What have we done? Do you think he'll forgive us?"
You see, we hadn't actually sat in the chair in ages, but that didn't mean nobody had been.
It didn't take Ivan too long to come up with an alternate solution, however, and despite my worries about getting cat hair all over every article of clothing I own, I just couldn't in good conscience kick him out. You see, it seems that he's found a new favourite chair in roughly the same northeast bedroom sector.
That's right. My closet. But I'm the jerk who threw his chair away. What is there to do?