I spent the first three weeks sleeping on the floor. I can deal with that, I've slept in some mighty odd places before for extended periods of time. I had a camping air mattress and a sleeping bag, and it wasn't so bad, even lying on my stomach to use my laptop.
Then I managed to pick up a lumpy old mattress and box-spring from my neighbors, and got a cheap desk and chair, and I was happy. It had been about an even year since I had an honest-to-god mattress to sleep on, after a long series of couches, futons, dorm trundle-bed things, and miscellaneous piles of dirty laundy and whatnot. It was like dying and going to Heaven, only without white light at the end of the tunnel and everything. True, my major decorating motif is packing crates and empty alcohol bottles, but if you knew my neighborhood you'd realize that that was totally appropriate.
So this weekend my mother comes to visit. She takes one look at my place, gasps daintilly, holds back a swooning fit through sheer force of will, and says that it looks like I live in a slum. Well, duh. I do live in a goddamn slum. But the upshot was that she ended up dragging me to a furniture store, and laying down plastic for enough up-scale furnishing objects to be worth six months' rent. Even a new mattress and box-spring, because the ones I got from my neighbors looked "old and lumpy". I tried to stop her. I swear to God I did.
What kind of a world is it where in a month you can go from sleeping on the floor and not minding to having enough ritzy furniture on order that I'll have to worry about my place getting broken into, all without doing anything? Nothing's changed about me between then and now, but all of the sudden I'm expected to feel like a Person of Substance. I'm not unhappy, but the prospect of all that blond hardwood and gunmetal-finish metallic gray tastefulness rattling in the back of a truck from There to Here doesn't seem real. I doubt it'll seem real when it gets here. I just don't get it. | 
