Goose Feathers are for Communists

Good Morning Readers! What do you know, it's 7:52 and I am functioning on a high enough level to get this thing out to you before noon. Hooray, and thank you for your patience over the last 5 or so posts.

I am currently sitting on a mattress that has more hills and valleys in it than the entire state of Minnesota. It is shaped like a W, and I am literally 6 inches lower than my husband when we sleep. Its really comfortable. If the definition of comfortable was horrible and the ability to instill rage in a person. Being that its only 6 years old and that my husband is cheap when it comes to things we actually need, he bought a 4 inch pillow top mattress pad thing off Overstock.com to make up for the hills and valleys....which sounds really sweet, but if you lay on it for more than 5 minutes, feels like its not even there since apparently goose feathers, can not, in fact, support the weight of a human body for a sustained amount of time. Who knew? Not me. So to make up for the misshapen-ness AND the anti-functioning pillow top, my husband found some ripped foam thingy that one of our friends left in our garage when he moved out of state to add to the disaster that we have been sleeping on for the last 6 years. Presumably this foam thingy worked well once upon a time, but being that it was sitting on the floor of our garage for a good year before Jimmy thought to use it, its integrity is beyond questionable. If we don't have bedbugs, or the clap from this thing, it will be a miracle. So why do two reasonably successful mid twenty somethings without kids not have a decent mattress? I shall tell you why.

Back in 2004, my mother, rest her soul, called me up and told me she had found a Queen sized mattress for me at a discount mattress outlet in Columbia Heights. That sentence right there should have been enough for me to politely decline, but being that I had been sleeping on the same Twin sized bed that I have had since I was 3, I wasn't about to turn up my nose at something from a place with the word discount in it. Plus, all my roommates at the time had these huge beds that could fit like 5 people in them, and when people came and looked in my room it looked like it was being rented out by a 7 year old. Because really, they don't make Twin sized sheets that are cool or grown up looking. They just don't. Need less to say, I purchased this discounted beast, and this is the bed that I met my husband in. Literally. So we have never known anything else together as a couple. And because of this, Jimmy believes that if we have been sleeping on it ok for this long, we might as well sleep on it for another 20!! Settle down ladies, he's all mine.

I finally convinced him to go look at mattresses a few weekends ago after waking up to a jacked up right shoulder. I'm not a doctor, but I think that sleeping at a 45 degree angle with all your weight on one shoulder for 5 consecutive hours at a time isn't good for it. So we go to HOM furniture, which incidentally has always pissed me off, because: Removing the last letter of a word doesn't make your place of business unique or more exciting. Neither does adding a few letters to the end. "No sir, I'm not impressed by your Ice Cream Shoppe. Kindly let me through so I can make my way over to DQ for a non-pretentious Red Dilly Bar" Once inside HOMe, I immediately become anxious. Going into any place where high pressure salesmen are waiting to pounce and watch your every move is about as fun for me as getting my fingernails pulled off. I hate it. Completely. Because I always feel obligated to purchase something. I know its stupid and that I'm exactly the customer that they are looking for, so you don't have to tell me that. I already know it. But I still cant help feeling immense amounts of guilt. Thank you 12 years of Catholic Schooling.

What it comes down to, is that I don't like lying to these people. "Oh sure, we'll come back next Saturday...what time do you work again?" I hate it. I know that some of them are assholes just looking to make a commission, but my soul doesn't allow for me to make promises to a random stranger that we both know I'm not going to keep. It makes me want to throw up. Jimmy , on the other hand could give two shits what anyone thinks of him. Its a big part of why I like him--awww tear. So he brazenly walks through the aisles of beds, sometimes flinging himself onto one just to get a reaction out of the 60 year old salesman who has been creepily following us for the last 10 minutes. To sum up, we spend 2 hours there lying on and testing out beds. We decided on two, and Jimmy makes us go back and forth between the two at least 15 times. By this point, the man has decided to wait for us on a mattress in between the 2 we are running back and forth from and looks like he is questioning why he decided to come out of retirement. Aside from the anxiety, I am also starting to get excited that we are actually going through with this. We are getting a new mattress!!! No more praying for an out of town wedding with the sole purpose of wanting to sleep on a California King at the Holiday Inn--which by the way, are amazing. They are like 30 feet across. An entire family of Refuges could sleep comfortably in one of those puppies. So I'm getting excited, and the excitement is starting to overpower the nerves, because I think, wow we are actually going to come back next weekend and do the damn thing. In one weekend, I will be sleeping on a cloud and will never have to worry about waking up looking like a circus contortionist again.

But then it happens: By some freak coincidence, I happen to catch the look in Jimmy's eye at the exact moment he decides we aren't actually in fact buying a new mattress from this place, and that these last 2 hours have been a waste of every one's time. I then watch him ask what time the man works next weekend and take his business card. As we walk down the 17 flights of stairs to the bottom level of HOMe, each step brings me a little further away from a restful nights sleep, and as I reach the step that takes the mattress I fell in love with out of my line of sight for good, I shed a single tear. I sit down in the car dejected, as my husband cranks up the radio and says "I was planning on just ordering one off of Overstock the entire time"

Fin.

Happy Friday. Have a super sexy fun time weekend.