The Love Seat

Here is a lady reclining against a love seat and looking sad. She didn’t make the 2013 calendar but today she made the blog.

Let me tell you a story about how love seats infuriate me...

New York is not an easy place to live, I mean, yes they warned me about all sorts of new york specific things from cockroach infestations to $28 cocktails but no one told me that living here also meant sacrificing the right to comfortably recline in the comfort of my home.

I have the smallest couch ever and it is all because of NYC’s extreme rent prices driving me to live in a miniature house for elves that does not allow the ownership of adult human sized furniture.

So... about my couch.

For starters, it's not a couch. It's a love seat and it IS. NOT. LOVING. It arrived from Ikea in a box, and has been contaminating my happiness for going on 14 months.

You see, my elvin apartment building has a 24” wide entry hall. So the only way to bring a couch in was to find one that could arrive in a box. And turns out, couches don’t come in boxes. BUT... Ikea love seats do.

Sitting on this thing is a real tight rope act. You literally cannot relax on this couch. In fact, if anything, it subliminally infuses you with more stress just by being near it. It is not unlike sitting in an airline seat every night when you get home to watch TV. Not natural.

The smallness is not immediately apparent, but as soon as you attempt to settle in you realize you are perilously teetering on the edge of falling off and that there is nothing to settle into.... And then another person comes and tries to sit on it with you. Thats when things really go from bad to worse.

I don’t care how much you love that other person, this couch will make you begin to question their need to sit down.* The love seat has worked it’s evil. The fellow sitter is everywhere you want to be.

• Sometimes it’s fun. Fun in that way a situation becomes fun when it has hit rock bottom and you just have to laugh to keep from crying. In the fleeting moments of thinking our loveseat woes were quirky and endearing I considered starting a blog documenting the various shapes we’ve created while trying to share the loveseat. Some of them are borderline circ du soleil in their intricacy.

And not only is it pointedly uncomfortable to sit on but it has become a source of crippling embarrassment.

Whenever someone says "wow, you must love living in New York, it's so exciting" I smile and say thank you. What I'm thinking is "my couch came out of a box and it’s trying to kill me" and then I start thinking “do they know? they must know. That’s why they said that!! So superior. i bet they have 3 COUCHES”

Anyway... my point is...  if you hadn’t guessed:

Love seats are impractical, couches are for winners.

Keep commissioning me and buying my stuff so that someday I can move into a house with a couch, NOT a love seat. (you can start by buying a print of this sketch!)