I LOVE Ikea. I really, truly do. It’s a wonderful place filled with wonderful things. But like most things, it’s not the “thing” itself that one loves, its the emotions that the “thing” brings out of us. I love Ikea because it unleashes so many emotions, from glorious elation, to pure fury, it’s the sort of emotional roller-coaster that M. Night Shamylan still wishes he was able to direct. Here are the many emotions of that Swedish lumberland, Ikea.

The happiness

Whenever someone moves to a new city, unless that city is called “Nowheresville”, the first question out of their mouth will be “where is the nearest Ikea?” Forget knowing where the hospitals are in case you get gallstones in the night, you MUST know where to get a reasonably priced barstool, ASAP. Figuring out the Ikea situation in a new city is crucial for the young adult with newly disposable income, because you can worry about compounding interest later, right now, you have an apartment with holes in the drywall and various fauna for roommates that absolutely needs a sofa made of poster-board and rejected Lego parts.

The furniture really is half the story at Ikea though as the store itself is the star attraction. This is the biggest lie we tell ourselves, that we go to Ikea for the bargains. We go to Ikea to be subjected to an avalanche of colors and supposed Swedish style for three hours straight. The compactness of different showrooms, the immaculate preparation of even the paper napkins on dining room modules, all create an interior designer contact high to all homemakers who clog Ikea car parks on weekends.

Did I mention that Ikea has a restaurant? I say restaurant, in reality its more like a your high school cafeteria, complete with ladies who lunch and copious amounts of steamed green bean fumes. Ah see, you thought I was going to go for the cheap horse-meat joke there didn’t you? Seriously though, Ikea’s genius is in its restaurant. Ikea’s founders were so confident that you’d waste entire weekends in a strangely lit warehouse that they foresaw your eventual need for calorical intake. And such great foods are available! Nowhere else are you able to simultaneously get dry waffles, vegetables which were exposed to just a little too much radiation, wretched “pasta”, and a can of Lutfisk that you and your colon will regret tremendously later. The Ikea restaurant, a place that the Michelin guide once called “an establishment”, is a sign that Swedes really are Viking descendants; feast heartily on what one would generously label as “food” before heading off to pillage as much stuff as you can carry in your longboat…I mean shopping cart.

the horror

You did it, you just filled out the last line on the fourth order slip with your twentieth baby pencil. All the pieces you need to assemble your new abode are stuck together in a 3D tetris configuration that only a techie savant could know how set up. It teeters on the perfect balance point, so much so that even the weight of a single fly landing on top of the deck-chairs would result in several horrific crushing deaths. As the cashier starts scanning items off the glacier-sized mound of furniture, your face turns whiter than … well … another damn glacier.

You thought you were getting a bargain deal. You even visited the “I’m an Idiot and I Microwaved my New Coffee Table” section near the registers and managed to find the one corner sofa without blood stains in the cushion. But no, Ikea won’t let you go that easy. Soon, your receipt is starting to resemble a sensible mortgage application. A once innocent looking group of cardboard boxes quickly transcends the monetary plane, assuming its final form, and as Hans Zimmer blasts on his organs some more, Ikea begins to go to town on your wallet, beating your now blasted credit score into a big red and purple mush on the cold, cold concrete Ikea floor.

But those potted plants were on sale! JOKE’S ON YOU SUCKER, YOU SHOULD HAVE CHECKED THE STICKER PRICES. You can’t back out now, because nobody wants to be a cheapskate at Ikea, it’d be like proclaiming yourself King Cheapskate of all Cheapskates. You’re forced to continue throwing your money away as the cashier wryly smiles at yet another despaired soul, slowly coming to the realization that all Ikea furniture eventually gets sold for 20 bucks on Craigslist. That’s a worse return on investment than giving a sock full of quarters to Bernie Madoff. It’s not over yet though. If you do make it out the exit and to your car with still your underwear on, you get to pass through the last part of the Ikea gauntlet; loading furniture.

Modern science doesn’t know for sure, but years of research suggest that the loading of Ikea furniture into cars may be slightly more difficult than getting pandas to reproduce. This is because Ikea furniture is packaged terribly. If you took just a couple of Ikea boxes to MIT, you’d force at least two of its top professors to hang themselves because of the sheer geometric complexity. The result for you, the consumer with a small car to match a very small budget, is that you’re either stuck with having to spend even more cash to rent a truck, or you’re going to have to stick that gearshift in a very, very cozy place on the ride home.

THE rage

Home. It’s within sight. Old Fido waiting for you on the porch, twilight fast approaching, your car’s tires rub against the wheel arches for the final time as you mount the curb. Two hernias, four medium lacerations, and a fractured tailbone later, all the boxes are inside your “house” (if we’re being nice) and ready to be opened like it’s Christmas morning. That’s when the self-deception begins.

“I can assemble these things, heck they even gave me instructions, and I can call the store if I need any help” is what we all says prior to unboxing anything from Ikea. But we all know the truth, we know the hours of agony that await us. Agonies found only in the deepest circles of hell, the ones Dante would have written about if he ever had to deal with missing wooden pegs. First, the cardboard gets everywhere. You might as well have stepped into a paper factory for all you know, and then it dawns on you, you haven’t even started putting these things together. Your house is already a mess before you even think about trying to organize the various pieces of furniture, pieces that once out of the box look like the drunken love-children of M.C. Escher and a bag of mulch chips.

“Ok, you can do this, just take these two pieces, and put them together…now those bits there…what?” Half an hour later, you’ve managed to put together four slabs of the cheapest “wood” known to man using pieces from different furniture sets, all the while ignoring the fact that once you reach the final step, you will have to go all the way back to step number three in order to reverse that stupid desk rail that everyone puts on in the wrong order. And that’s when it happens. The snap.

You’ve wasted an entire weekend walking miles inside a warehouse that, had the building codes been different, would have been the site of a quadruple murder. You spent months of future income on things that hold less value than Lehman Brothers stocks, destroying your car’s interior and smashing the rear windshield on a shoddily manufactured shower curtain rod, ONLY TO FIND THAT THE SCREWS YOU USED TO HOLD THE TABLE LEGS TOGETHER ACTUALLY BELONGED TO THE ARMOIRE YOU SCRATCHED WHILE BRINGING IT UP THE STAIRS?!?

Nothing brings a man to blaspheme faster than building Ikea furniture. In fact, the good folks at the Oxford Dictionary often do Ikea runs whenever their list of profanities starts to sound outdated. It is indeed the case that most seismographic activity recorded by the world’s numerous earthquake monitoring sensors is actually the slamming of half assembled Ikea dining room chairs on Sunday evenings. In short, it’s not a pretty sight.

Requiem

And so another Ikea cycle ends. Not only is your crappy house even crappier now, you’re bleeding from the head for some reason and nobody can find the cat. You’re left penniless. Tiny, worthless Allen keys are strewn about the floor like used tissues in a teenage boy’s room, your loved ones avoiding any and all eye contact lest they experience a fate worse than Lot’s wife (look it up, plebiscite). All that’s left is a broken husk of your former self, anguishing on your knees, drowning in a sea of plastic bags and disappointment. But look on the bright side, that painting you got for just 10 bucks looks really nice! Until the string breaks and the frame shatters over your back.

The truth is that no other store sets you on this weekend long adventure towards fatalistic failure. No other store is ready to welcome you with open arms and just under four hours later deliver a swift death knell to your finances. No other store challenges your stomach to a fist fight by selling you random mystery meat while making you walk a marathon. No other capitalist enterprise brings so many emotions. No other store offers so much, and gets so much out of you at the same time. God bless you Ikea, you beautiful bastards you.