Growing up, I inhabited a tiny bedroom in which I rearranged the furniture every now and then to find some extra space. I got really good at moving heavy objects around—my twin bed, my chest of drawers, my dresser drawers with the mirror, my nightstand, etc. I would rearrange my books and magazines, my clothes, and my other stuff around them, and I would do it all by myself, cute little me with the scrawny arms and legs. I got buff in a girly way.

During this time, I developed a strong liking to the natural oak look with the smooth, rounded corners. I found myself dreaming of the ideal furniture, and the ideal furniture was heavy, sturdy, and a pain to move. Nevertheless, I set out to acquire said furniture someday.

When my family moved to a townhouse with bigger bedrooms, my furniture indeed became heavier and sturdier—real oak wood! I had a computer desk—with a return and a hutch—that was a bitch to move around even without the computer equipment on it. I had a twin waterbed with a real oak frame, and that, too, was a bitch to move around. I had a real oak bookshelf with a cupboard at the bottom, my favorite piece of furniture and still in my possession; it’s a major pain in the ass to move, but I can do it on a carpeted surface.

When I moved out on my own into a two-bedroom apartment in Vista, I took the bookshelf with me. I also took a new queen-sized bed with a metal frame, my old chest of drawers, my old nightstand, and my mother’s real oak bookshelf to accomodate even more books. Tables? Chairs? Couch? Goodness, no. That would have been asking for a hernia on top of everything.

Yeah, I was quite happy with my furniture. I remember feeling bad for a couple of my friends when I visited their apartment and saw that they used bricks and wooden boards for a makeshift bookshelf. They were non-apologetic and actually kind of proud of it. “It makes things easy to move!” they said, and I merely shook my head. I continued to prefer the heavy and sturdy real oak wood stuff.

During my time in Vista, when the company for which I was working decided not to renew the lease on the office space, I was given some money for furniture and told to work at home. That’s how I acquired a really nice-looking $400 Sauder desk with a “natural wood” veneer; it was my first choice among those “assembly required” office furniture, and I assembled it with my own hands with love and pride. I would have preferred the real oak wood stuff, but it would have cost me more than the allowance I was given.

Still, although the beautiful Sauder desk was made mostly of particle board and not of oak, it was heavier than all of my other furniture and was also the most unwieldy. It actually broke apart during my last move, when some incompetent mover decided to beat on it to get it to fit into a smaller space between the boxes and other “stuff” in the moving truck. Since then, I’ve been working on a peeling fold-out table, longing for a new desk.

So, I set out to buy myself a desk and a file cabinet, and after having moved a couple of times now with the real oak wood stuff in tow and with broken furniture pieces in my wake, I’ve found that I’ve changed my standards; I got myself something inexpensive, light, easy to move, and with wheels. Wheels! I put it together last night, right after I bought it, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

The old me might have scoffed at it for the fact that it doesn’t look as heavy or as sturdy as a real oak piece of furniture, but the new me says, “It makes things easy to move!” And until I get settled permanently into a home that I own, that’s very important to me. I want to be able to move this thing if it ever comes down to moving again, and if or when I ever do get myself some real quality oak wood stuff that’s a bitch to move, I refuse to ever budge again. Come hell or high water, I will stay at that house or leave all the furniture behind. And that’s that.

The mountain can simply come to me at that time, but until then, I have wheels. Woohoo!

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