My Favorite Mistake.

Many of you may be familiar with the song that I got the title of this blog post from.  It's a pretty well-known Sheryl Crow tune.  Since most of you know that I'm happily married, this blog post will not be about a filandering, cheating man (namely Eric Clapton)  In fact, my favorite mistake isn't a person at all.  It is, instead, an unhealthy relationship with a home furnishing store.

Perhaps you've heard of it?

Yes, it is that Swedish gift from God (and perhaps, the Devil), IKEA.  Most people know that I pretty much have a joygasm when I have the opportunity to shop at this place.  You may also be aware that I'm woefully located a whopping 7 hour drive from the nearest IKEA.  It's kind of unfair, really.  If I had to pick a major con of living in Kansas City, it would be the brutal winters, followed closely by it's sad lack of IKEA anywhere in the vicinity. 


Since we've purchased a home, we've really only had the opportunity to hit an IKEA twice.  The first opportunity was during a trip to Michigan.  Sadly, we could only buy some light fixtures and cabinet hardware because we had to fit it into checked baggage.  The second opportunity was during a roadtrip with our pals to Minneapolis.  The major holdup here was that there were 4 people in the car, all of us are obsessed with IKEA, plus we had our bags with us.  Don't worry though, we managed to cram as much as we could into the car.  See evidence below.

The third and final trip to IKEA took place last week.  I had just about a month off between quitting job #2 in KC and heading back to job #1.  Since we hadn't been to my parents house in over 7 months, we decided we'd drive to Michigan to visit them. Sure, sitting in a car for 12 hours sucks, however, there were a plethora of pros:

• Sudhir and I played "would you rather" and I learned a lot of interesting things about my husband.
• It was 400 dollars cheaper than both of us flying
• We drove so we could go to IKEA and fill the beast full of fun stuff.

Obviously, some of the pros were cooler than others. 

Anyway, I went shopping with my bestie and her two adorable children.  I found the desk that I wanted to get Sudhir pretty quickly.  It was a very simple kidney-bean-shaped, glass-top deal with a couple of locking file cabinets on either side.  Nothing too extravagant or fancy but it was beautiful and I loved it.  I dutifully wrote down all the info I thought I would need to collect it from the self serve area. 

Uh, wrong. 

I only wrote the aisle and bin numbers down.  I thought that combined with the name of the collection would be enough.  Not so.  It took about an hour to get the info I needed and get the stuff loaded onto the cart.  At this point, with one full shopping cart and one full furniture cart, we head to the checkout.  My godson was hungry (who could blame him?  We'd been at this place for 3.5 hours!!)  We get everything rung up and I reach into my purse to get my wallet to pay the nice lady her $488.00.  I realize I have no wallet.  I almost burst into tears.  To make an already long story short, my bestie totally saved my ass by charging everything for me.  Then my mom totally saved my ass by writing her a check because I had no check book or way to give her the money so she could pay off the card (short of giving her a ton of cash.)

We hauled our extremely overstuffed car home 12 hours, cringing everytime we hit a pothole since the table top is glass and could crack into a bazillion pieces.  We made it home, and thought, "Hmm, how hard could this possibly be?  It's a top with 4 legs."  Again, we were seriously mistaken.  After over 6 hours of sweating, cursing, assembling, realizing we did it wrong, and disassembling and reassembling, we finally completed the task.  The whole beauty of IKEA is how beautiful and simple, and most importantly, how insanely cheap their stuff is.  the desk was about $200.00 total with the file cabinets and all.  It took 2 pretty well-paid individuals almost a full work day to assemble that bad boy.  I figure that probably puts the price of this thing over a grand.  After all is said and done, I still love IKEA.  However, boy, do they need to work on the experience of shopping there, transporting their stuff home, and assembling it. It's so bad that a group of people who love their stuff, but hate their instructions and how complicated shopping there is, put together an entire website dedicated to helping people out:  http://www.ikeafans.com/the-ikeafans-story.html

Here's the product of all our hard work.  Not sure it was worth it, but Sudhir sure likes it.

In conclusion, IKEA isn't exactly like Eric Clapton was for Sheryl Crow.   For me, the pain and agony of going to the store, getting the shit home, and putting it together is horrifyingly awful.  It's almost enough to make me swear off the store all together.  *ALMOST*

I sure do like the outcome though.

The Pursuit of Happiness

I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately.  This is probably a result of the last several weeks that I spent at a new job, in a new industry.  It was a lot like going to war for the second time.  It was intense, it was familiar, and it gave me flashbacks to a much unhappier time in my life.  Most people who know me know the whole story.  Indulge me however, in pretending that maybe one or two complete strangers read my blog.  Unlikely, I know...

In 2005, I picked up and moved from Kansas City to NYC for love.  I worked for a a small company in the financial industry.  That company was wildly successful.  As a result, I made a lot of money.  More money than I thought possible, in fact.  One might think that such success would bring about a great deal of happiness.  Instead, it took a toll on my health, brought me stress beyond belief, ungodly work hours, and a strain on my marriage.  Not exactly what I signed up for.  After 3.5 years of overwork, I came to a really unsettling conclusion as I was waiting to cross the street to get to the train station.  The sign said "Don't Walk."  A bus was coming.  You know things are bad when you consider stepping out in front of the bus so that you don't have to go to work that day.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't suicidal or anything.  I just figured I'd get a week off at least if I was maimed by a bus.  It dawned on me:  I was wasting what should have been the best years of my life busting my ass so that I didn't disappoint a bunch of people who didn't really care if my marriage was okay or not. 

My dad is a really wise man.  He said "Don't be so busy making a living that you forget to make a life."  Genious.  Anyway, to make a really long story short, I decided that in order to reclaim my life, I needed to quit my job, and try to leave the god forsaken east coast.  This was no small task.  We had bought a condo at the height of the market.  If anyone recalls what life was like around 2009, that was pretty close to the pit for real estate.  It didn't matter.  I wanted out.  As a result of quitting my job, and not selling the house for 6 months, plus selling it at a price that caused us to drop all the cash we had in our savings, we moved to KC with nothing but our belongings, cat, and some debt since we had to pay for our move with credit cards.  We also were armed with a valuable lesson:  money does not buy happiness. 

The job I took was for less than a quarter of what I was making in NYC.  It didn't matter though.  I worked with awesome people, the work was easy...and on most days, I'd get home, work out, cook dinner, and eat dessert before 6:30pm.  I almost didn't know what to do with myself.  A year and a half passed and all was well for the most part.  Enter a new job opportunity.  It was everything I had ever hoped for in a job.  Way more money, the potential to hire my own team, it was in an exciting industry...and in one that was accessible to everyone.  I let myself be lured away because it seemed too good to be true.

It, of course, was.

I just wrapped up what can only be considered a 30 day experiment.  In that 30 days, I worked every evening, every weekend, and accomplished more in 30 days than in 4 months at most jobs.  I pretty much knew on day 3 that I had made a mistake.  I should have known better.  I'm smart enough to know that if a company has kegs, pool tables, and fooseball, they're trying to make it fun because you live there.  And boy, did I.  Like anyone has time to play pool or ping pong.  Christ, I barely had time to correct people when they called me Arty.  So while maybe I made the same mistake I did at my previous company in NYC, I give myself credit.  It took me 3.5 years to get out then.  It took me 30 days this time.  I'd say my average is considerably better. 

At first, I was so horrifically embarassed.  I left my old company on a euphoric cloud of excitement, basically shouting from the rooftops how awesome my new gig was going to be.  I felt like such a failure.  Then I realized something...if I hadn't tried it, I would never have known that it was completely the wrong fit for me.  I would have always wondered what it would have been like.  Now I know.  I also have to say...I'm so glad I did this just to remind myself how happy I was before with what I had.  You don't know how good you have it until it's gone.

I have a friend who said something really profound.  She said, "At some point, you just have to be happy with what you have because it's enough."  Deep, huh?  If you really think about it, people always seem to be striving for more.  There was study out there that claimed that everyone always thinks they'd be happy if they made 15% more than they currently do.  That's a vicious cycle because you're always just out of reach of happiness.  If the last 30 days have taught me anything, it's that my arms are tired and they're tired of reaching.  Life is too short, and frankly, I've got a lot to be happy about already.  Why continue to chase the rabbit?

So here's to lessons learned, to being happy with what we have, and for working to live and not living to work.

Let's hope that the reduced work hours will lead to an increased frequency of blogging :)

I'm so very back.