Des Moines was deemed too small and insignificant the consumer-fest that is the great IKEA. Although I confess to a love of wandering Pottery Barn, aside from the play kitchen I gave Katy for Christmas (because it was on sale), I really was too intimidated, and at the time too poor, to make any big purchases. Will was the one who loved dish-ware and cookware and dreamed of the perfectly outfitted home. Well, kitchen and patio anyway. And, I find it a tad insulting to be told by an entity, that basically sees me as a cash cow, how to decorate my own home. Those catalog layouts of living rooms and kitchens and scary clean children’s bedrooms are like the pictures of hairstyles that women take to their stylists. They look good on paper, but not on your own head. I have never seen a living room that looks like the display or the photo from Better Homes and Gardens unless the home’s occupants paid someone to do the decorating for them (and then paid someone else to keep it clean and tidy as well).

Phoebe: That fan kinda looks like ours. And the birdcage and the…wait a sec! This is our exact living room!

Rachel: No! No! No! No it’s not! No it’s not! Come on! Phoebe, ours is totally different! I mean we don’t have the… (Looks desperately for something different.) We don’t have the…that lamp! And-and that screen is y’know, on the other side.

Phoebe: Oh my God. This is where you got all our stuff, Pottery Barn! Oh my God!

Rachel: Okay! Okay-okay look—no I did, I just wanted this stuff and I know how you feel about Pottery Barn. Just… Come on don’t be mad.

Phoebe: No-no-no, but I am mad! I am mad! Because this stuff is everything that is wrong with the world! And it’s all sitting up in my living room and all I can think about is how I don’t have that lamp!

* Season Six of Friends: The One with the Apothecary Table

There comes a time in everyone’s life when furniture is needed and in our case it was a desk for Katy, cd/dvd storage and a bookcase. And thus began my introduction to home interior conformity on the grandest of all scales: IKEA.

The IKEA store is located in South Edmonton Common which is an outdoor mall so poorly designed for traffic that walking from store to store is impossible. The IKEA building itself is mammoth. There is a restaurant and a child-minding area on site. The top level consists of display after display of rooms laid out on a track complete with arrows on the floor and “street signs”. There is even a map with places to write down your selections for easy location once you reach the warehouse at the end of your visit. They even supply you with a pencil, and I think that the fact that it doesn’t have an eraser is no accident.

Deer in the headlights is my initial reaction. There was just too much to look at and I was glad that I took the time to locate what we needed on the company’s website before we went. My second reaction was want. I wanted the perfect kitchen and the storage options had me drooling for the day when we have a walk-in closet to put those lovely shelves and sliding drawers. My third reaction is disgust with myself. How can I hope to simplify my life if I am lusting after granite countertops (Will you settle for Corian, my husband asks, with an under-hung sink?) and a walk-in closet that could double as a small bedroom (or even a whole house in some places in this world). With horror I realize that I could easily become an IKEA slut.

We escaped though with only those items we came for (and okay a bag of multi-colored clasps for sealing opened bags of food – damn that perfect product placement) and so my virtue is intact for another day. Dodging the consumerism bullet requires full-time vigilance however. It is easy to slip into the mindset upon which mindless shopping is based. Want as opposed to need. Too easy by far and the people at IKEA know this.