Announcement: M!'s sexuality is not in question. Thank you.

I went to Ikea tonight with M3 and M!. Ikea, while fun, is always sort of a mind-boggling experience. It starts out as a racous good time in the living room area, where you bounce on and off the sofas and sit authoritatively in all the chairs, saying "Make it so, Number One," and "Phyllis, fax these papers over to Smith & Wesson for a signature." Then you move on to the bedroom area, where I always feel a little squidgy about actually lying on the beds, so I do the two-handed bend-'n'-bounce, which proves nothing and makes me look like an idiot in the process. Then it's on through kitchens, where your initial enthusiasm has faded to polite quasi-interest, equivalent to a nod-and-smile conversation you have when you meet your dentist in the grocery store. Escaping the limbo of pseudopine countertops, you head down the stairs into kitchen accesories, where you become lost in a miasma of ostensibly useful utinsils before stumbling blindly through children's furniture and rugs, wishing desperately that there were a couch, a chair, even that stupid wicker ottoman anywhere in sight. By the time you reach lamps you're sure that you'll be lost in Ikea forever, and despite the plethora of light, you cannot see your way out of this mess, and indeed make several wrong turns until you FINALLY CRAWL INTO THE WAREHOUSE where you can actually see the Mecca that is the check-out lanes, where you collapse, exhausted, and somebody has to throw a soda from the food stand in your face to revive you.

Add to this one best friend with a constant excess of energy and difficulty making decisions, plus one excessively sarcastic son of an interior designer, shake and strain over ice into a martini glass, emphasis on the strain. Chase with a shot of Target. Good times for everybody.