indo'stine: twist of vate.

So I know that we're anxiously awaiting the New Apartment post, but not all of our furniture has arrived yet, and so I'm holding off to make the experience more...authentic? Suffice it to say, for now, that we are moved in -- all three of us -- that's me, D & E for those playing the home game -- and that life is progressing apace. Classes start tomorrow, and so it's all down hill (and like into the volcano...) from here.

Since I can't give you a photo-tour just yet, I thought, well -- they like reading about my attempts at putting things together, and -- it just so happens! -- I put something together the other day, and so I thought I'd tell y'all about it. That way, there are kind of sneak-peak pictures of my new bedroom, but the rest remains as yet a mystery.

In any event, I put together a lamp.

An Ikea lamp (that song never gets old), of course, complete with stupid instructions that don't make any sense, and the Naked Guy there with his allen wrench -- and, of course, because I am unapologetically myself, I bought a weird lamp. Not just a lamp lamp. I have taken to calling it the Bubble Lamp, or the Holy Orb, or the Looks Like a Cocktail Onion Lamp (that last one needs work) -- so of course it's even more complicated than a regular old garden variety lamp would've been. And being from Ikea, it has a proper name: Vate. I suppose we should start at the beginning.

This is what the box said it should look like, more or less, and here is the dangerous electric-type piece and, of course, the eensy weensy allen wrench, adorable.

Here are the rest of the pieces.

Do they look like they make sense? No, I thought not. From here, of course, we move to the floor, because these things require a certain amount of acrobatics (I mean, they do for me, I dunno about the rest of you. But if I can't explode all over the floor with a box of Ikea parts, then nothing will ever get put together.), and the lamp is rather...not large, per se, but long, I suppose, and so here's a sneak peak of my pretty marble floor, along with Vate's first steps toward Lampdom.

Looks more or less like a keyhole. Or the shape of one. No idea what you would need a keyhole that big for, but you never know. The Key of Life. The Key TO Life? Nope, just a lamp.

So the next step was figuring out a way to get the circular bottom bit attached to the floor bit...before it falls over, which it does inevitably, being a circle bit, and physics and gravity and such. I resorted to pinning it upright with my legs, and so now y'all get a good shot of my luscious thighs...clenched to this stupid piece of Ikea art deco tomfoolery.

I would like to note that I would not have to go through this bullshit (over and over again) if Singapore did not have a bizarre fixation with fluorescent light. There is a perfectly usable light built into my ceiling, but it pours down the most horrific, white, awful light that you have ever seen, and frankly I am a creature meant to live in soft glows and pooling shadows. So I persevere.

At last, Vate was on its feet!

What you see beyond Vate's tentative first attempt at standing are the doors to the corridor beyond my bedroom (on the left) and to my bathroom (on the right), and of course my desk chair which follows me everywhere.

Next, I got the shade to look right, but I was too busy wrestling it into submission to take any pictures of the process. It happened very fast. Not without some cursing. A reenactment, perhaps?

"How does this fucking work?"

Shade says nothing.

"Fucking -- attach, you piece of--"

Shade says nothing, smugly.

"--Be orb-like! Dammit!"

Shade submits. Christine moves on to the more complicated part. Where the hell does the light bulb go?