Life-Size LEGOs

What do a saucepan, the bottle opener of a multitool, and a borrowed mallet have in common? All three were involved in assembling my brand new IKEA furniture. I moved for the seventh time in six years of college in August and for the first time ended up in an unfurnished townhouse. After three days without a bed and a week without any other furniture, I got a ride to IKEA and finished furnishing my bedroom, minus desk chair. (I lasted a solid month without any chairs in the apartment.)

Over the next week, I assembled a bookcase, desk, and dresser. I started with the bookcase, which was about as simple as it gets: sides, top, bottom, backing, and shelves. The problems began with the screwdrivers required. I have an entire precision screwdriver set with several dozen screwdriver bits. Key word: precision. Shockingly enough, screws you might find in a computer or watch are not the same size as screws you might find in furniture. I grabbed the largest Phillips and flathead bits I had, ignored the call IKEA for help page in the instructions, and started putting pieces together.

This continued until I reached the back of the bookcase. The backs of cheap IKEA bookcases are a dense cardboard-type material that you slide into a slot and nail into place. Problem number two: I don’t have a hammer. Instead of summoning a hammer from the sky Amazon or borrowing one from any number of people I know who might plausibly own hammers, I started looking around for solid metal objects. I only own a limited number of solid metal objects, so it didn’t take long for me to settle on my pot. My faithful pot, which has now cooked me two years of pasta and rice, served nicely as a hammer.

A couple days later, I worked on the desk. I pulled out my trusty precision screwdrivers, ignored the fix this item with a friend page in the instructions, and inserted the first of many screws. Everything went fine until the end. I had gotten the top aligned, everything was secured in place, and then I looked down at the remaining dowel in my parts bag. Dowel, singular, not used in any of the remaining steps. Third problem? Or not? After flipping back through the instructions, I believe it was an extra part. If not, the desk hasn’t fallen down yet. I should have counted, but there were no spare parts for the bookcase and I really wasn’t interested in counting four dozen screws, three dozen cams, three dozen dowels, and various other miscellaneous parts.

This brings us to the dresser, which I left for last after realizing that I would have to assemble each and every drawer. This is also where the multitool and mallet come into play. My screwdrivers and I ignored the tipping hazard page in the instructions and got the frame of the dresser screwed together, aligned, and standing. Next, the drawers needed to be put together. After temporarily misplacing all my drawer fronts (they were on my bed), I identified the backs, sides, and bottoms and got to work. I attached the sides to a drawer back. The bottom slid in nicely. The front needed to be secured by ridged plastic nails(?). Return of problem two: I (still) don’t have a hammer. I decided to spare my pot, the drawers, and my neighbors’ ears and borrowed a mallet.

Finally, after several hours, a scraped palm, and a lacerated toe, I could insert the drawers into the dresser. The last step was tightening plastic screws to keep the drawers from being pulled out all the way. Problem number three: my precision flathead screwdriver was not just probably too small, but entirely, utterly, much too small. I started looking around for other flat metal things and settled on the tip of the bottle opener on my multitool. I’ve been wondering if a coin would have been better, but the multitool sufficed without too much damage to the screw heads.

And that is how you assemble IKEA furniture with exactly none of the proper tools. Except the provided hex key. Long live the IKEA hex key.

Apple, apple, watermelon, strawberry

When I was first learning to play the clarinet, one of my music teachers told us how to count rhythms with fruit. It’s one of those funny things you do in band, like imagining you have a string attached to the top of your head that goes up to the ceiling and makes you sit up straight. But about the fruit. Words naturally have their own rhythms, some of which happen to coincide nicely with common musical rhythms. For example, “apple” is segmented into two even syllables that count off eighth notes neatly. We also use peach for quarter notes, pear for half notes, watermelon for sixteenth notes, strawberry for triplets, and blueberry for an eighth note followed by two sixteenth notes.¹

The title rhythm notated musically, verbally, and fruit-ically

The fruit was fun. Learning to play right hand C was not. The background you need to know for this involves two things: the key system of the clarinet and my hands. First, my hands. I am the size of a middle schooler. Second, the clarinet key system. The most commonly used key system is the Boehm system, and a handful of notes, including the C mentioned at the top of this paragraph, can be played either with your left or right pinky. When I first started playing in fourth grade, my hand was physically too small to reach the right hand C without much pain and struggle. I chose to avoid much pain and struggle by playing middle C with my left hand all the time. This continued throughout all of middle school and the first half of ninth grade. Then I started taking clarinet lessons.

During my very first lesson, my teacher asked me to play a two octave C scale and instantly noticed I was playing left hand C. She immediately started working to change that, because reasons. Actually, you need to be able to play both right and left hand C so that you can finger certain not uncommon runs and intervals.

Among the many ironies of my life, as I was being forced encouraged to play right hand C, we were preparing for our last concert of the year. One of our pieces was a medley of songs from The Little Mermaid. During “Under the Sea,” the third clarinets play an arpeggio in C, which is our home key². Except that the arpeggio goes from open G to middle C, a fingering change that moves from all holes open to all fingers on deck. I tried. I managed to get it a couple of times during rehearsal. Then I played the part with left hand C during the concert.

I’ve learned a lot of things in band over the years. I still remember my elementary school band teacher coming into the cafeteria at lunch time to sing solfege with the whole grade. Before every concert in middle school, we were reminded that early is on time. And then there’s all we learned about fingerings, working through tricky rhythms, breathing, shaping the line, balance, intonation, and right hand C. I play it like that by default now. Most of the time.

¹Five notes in a beat is “university,” six can be thought of as two triplets smashed together in one beat, and by the time you get to seven or more, you give up counting, fake lots of notes, and come in at the next downbeat.

²It’s our musical happy place. We have no sharps or flats.