I Will Not Buy Ikea Furniture and Other Resolutions

"Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
No day but today"

 

First in a maybe series of summer resolutions as I prepare to leave THE City for other pastures.

• I will not buy Ikea furniture because without my posse of fabulous, patient, handy roommates, I will not be able to put it together, and I will end up piling my books on the slabs of wood that could be a bookcase to someone more genius than I. Because Ivy League institutions do not have Ikea building classes (for shame!). And though I am sure my future roommates will also be awesome, I probably don't want to introduce myself to them by getting all irritated and worked up and teary over furniture, and while my sister will hopefully be there to help, she is pretty much as unhandy as I am, and two very caffeinated, very unhandy sisters getting cranky while holding hammers seems like an infinitely bad idea. Also, I don't know if my health insurance will have kicked in yet, and putting together Ikea furniture is a ridiculous thing to do without health insurance.

• I will walk the Brooklyn Bridge, read in Central Park, visit MoMA and the Met, organize a NYC scavenger hunt, and take full advantage of New York this summer. I will not don a fanny pack and morph into a tourist, but I will see what there is to see and enjoy this grimy, awesome city—while glaring at anyone who is wearing a fanny pack or carrying around a map.

• I will learn how to park so that I am less afraid of driving so that I will not hate my life when I spend much of it driving.

• I will invest in lots and lots of flip-flops because I can. And I will not feel guilty about it because I will get more use out of them than I have in the past and because they are cheaper than real shoes. Also, I will wear flip-flops always in my new city. (Though this does require dispensing of my beloved flip-flop rule—that after you stop wearing flip-flops for the winter, the first time you wear them again, you have declared the beginning of flip-flop season and there's no going back. A moment of thoughtlessness during an Indian summer in November could leave you totally stuck for the entire winter. This rule will be of little use, though, in a place where there is no winter.)