Grey's Journal

It began with my seven-year desire to buy a desk.  During my four years in college and three years in London I suffered through a series of small, inadequate work surfaces supplied to me in my numerous transitory flats.  While forced to work at a plastic school desk or a sewing table, I would fantasize about buying a mahogany monster of a desk, so massive it would need four men to carry it upon their shoulders into my room -- a funeral procession for the great tree that gave its life to further my work.

I never bought that desk because my leases were always less than a year and so the burden of moving the desk out at the end outweighed the benefit of moving it in.  However, after seven years of nomadic existence, permanence found me.

At the end of my PGCE course I leveraged the dearth of physics teachers in the UK to get a good job teaching in a posh girls' school with a flat nearby.  While I was happy at the job and in the flat, a nameless unease grew within me.  It took a long time to realize that I had passed a fundamental divide in my life without noticing: from always working toward the end of something -- be it high school, college, summer jobs or teacher training -- to having no end in sight, save that of retirement and death.

As I worked at my potentially-forever job and my 25th birthday loomed near, my mind began to whisper frightening thoughts to me, like finally buying that desk I always wanted.  Why not?  After all, I could stay in this flat forever.  Only the movers would take the desk out after I had collapsed of a brain hemorrhage on it while refreshing my will.  The desk would remind me everyday that I was taking the first step toward settling down, so I fought against the idea, even as I could feel my brain making it more appealing.

While I fretted at this self-constructed crossroad of life that buying or not buying the desk represented, someone else came to push me the direction she felt appropriate.  Her name is the highly unlikely Noelani, a Hawaiian girl who long ago read my journal and, through various twists and turns, became my flatmate for a year.

After she came to know me in real life, Noelani thought the journal was much less amusing than she had before.  ``I'm too close to your neuroses,'' she told me one day.  ``I always thought your journal was a kind of joke, but now that I know you actually think these thoughts, it's not funny.  It's frightening.''

When she visited me in my new flat and heard my complaints about not having a decent desk, she decided to take me to Ikea.

We walked around the store and I found myself imagining some theoretical home decorated to my tastes.  To discover that I had tastes horrified me.  A few weeks earlier I went to visit a friend who had just bought a flat with her fiancee and was in the process of decorating it.  She spoke for hours about mirror sizes, curtain selection and the trials of matching different woods in the same room.  God help me, but I listened with interest.  One day your parents are dragging you to Ikea as a bored teenager, wondering why and how your parents can care so much about furniture, and the next day you're walking into the store voluntarily, trying to pick a surface top that won't show fingerprints.  To find yourself enjoying thoughts that previously bored you into physical discomfort is an unnerving affair.  It feels as though your brain is being taken over by the invasion of the body snatchers.

Noelani did nothing to diminish these thoughts.  She wandered off to covertly watch me from a distance.  She'd catch me idly playing my fingers over a dark wood bookcase and smile in a way that made me uncomfortable.

``I'd like to see you when you're 32,'' she said.  ``I think you'll be just about perfect then.''

``Perfect?''

``You'll be much better at being a man then.''

``Excuse me?''

``Well, you've already made remarkable progress in the year I've known you.''

She herself is only twenty, but takes every opportunity to force me to acknowledge her greater maturity -- to which I respond by sticking out my tongue.

So we wandered through Ikea's tunnel floor plan which forces you to pass every part of the home decorating universe even if you are only there to buy something small and inconsequential.  It's a strange, hypnotic place that sells the  idea of a perfect domestic life, a store that both inspires song and crushes people to death.  ABBA played on the speakers and the smell of meatballs came through the air as we found the home office department.  I spent a small eternity browsing, essentially stalling for time and worried by how much I feel some adult part of me awaken and look forward to a life of tedious pleasures.  I eventually found a desk I liked and sat down before it, thinking for a while.

Working with kids forces you to realize some uncomfortable things about life.  As a teenager you know you'll be someone famous or important.  Why wouldn't you be?  You're you after all.  Sure, while trapped in school you go through the melodrama of apathy and depression, but that's because you're just doin' time until the good life automatically kicks in.  Teenagers look around at most grownups' work and see boring, lame lives.  `Thank God I'm not going to be like them' they think.

As a teenager I'd occasionally get the urge to write down a list of life goals while sitting in the back of a dull class.  My bullet points consisted of the the usual schizophrenic megalomania that can be expected from a teenage boy, such as wanting to be a rockstar CEO, a dictator, a writer, a ninja, a revolutionary, a tortured artist, a radio show host, universally loved, universally feared, a scientific genius, involved with women clearly beyond my league, and to die tragically and achieve immortality.

The above list is self-contradictory madness, but the point is that at the time it seemed like attainable madness.  When you transition into adulthood, reality forces you to face that you are one of those boring, lame people you so derided.  You are defeated by the forces of mediocrity in a battle you didn't know you were fighting until long after it was lost.  My teenage self, if given the foreknowledge that he was to become a physics teacher, would have despaired, but my adult self is content in that position.  I don't know which is worse, living a life that an earlier and more ambitious you would have scoffed at for its smallness, or being content with it.

When Noelani returned from gathering her own interior decorating fetish items, she sat on the desk I picked out to buy and saw the thoughts on my face.

``Wow, this is really bothering you, isn't it?''

``I don't know how I got here,'' I said.  ``I'm afraid that one day I'm going to wake up next to a wife with two kids down the hall in the middle of a suburban wasteland with an anonymous life... and that it won't bother me.  That I'll love my cage.  I'll look back on my thoughts now and not understand what I was worried about.''

``Are you sure you want to do this?''

``No, but it's going to happen anyway.''

I took out the little Ikea ordering sheet and wrote down the name of the desk.




Several weeks later, while sitting at my new desk, I turned 25 -- one quarter of a century.  Two quarters left.  I took out a piece of paper and wrote out what is important in my life and what average, but attainable, adult goals I wanted to achieve, and despaired.
 

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Copyright © 2006 Wellington Grey


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