O Office Chair, Where Art Thou?

Well, thirty days in and the biggest drama to hit my new work-from-home life has nothing to do with taxes or the ethics of working in pajamas or whether to watch Ellen or Martha, which are maddeningly on at the same time. So far, Ellen's ahead. No, the biggest dilemma has been the selection of an office chair. I've spent 29 days researching which one to go with and it's like trying to buy a car...every time you decide on one, you see a feature on another that sends you back to square one.

Should it be the $1000 Aeron, with the whizbangery and the namedrop-feature that comes along with it, where you can irritate everyone you know by saying "I was sitting in my Aeron this morning, pondering the national debt..."? Is that the right decision? Or should it be the also $1000 Think chair, which is actually more comfortable but not nearly as pretty and closes off any opportunity for furniture name-dropping because no one knows what the Hell a Think chair is?


All bets were off when I saw the Eames white leather chair, however. I rationalized and rationalized how I could justify a $2500 ass-holder. I lost sleep over it, trying to figure out how to hide the purchase. I mean, this wasn't like being a secret vodka-drinker, where you can just hide the bottles behind the shrubbery. No, this was a big white leather chair on wheels. So I did the right thing: I started looking at Target. And I found a sensible, $199 white mesh chair. I tried to order it today. Perhaps you can see those hateful little words, dear reader? "We're sorry, this item is out of stock." Oh, the wailing and the gnashing and the adult language! Such a scene has not been seen since Little Nell died. My life unfurled before me, a life spent sitting in a boring chair from Staples or Office Barn or Notebook Town or whatever the fuck those places are called. A chair which would look at home in a (I can barely type the word) cubicle. A chair which would fail to inspire me and would cause me to use Arial Bold over and over on every design project. Or Times New Roman at best.

And then! A ray of hope! Sister Meg suggested visiting this overpriced modern furniture shop and there in the far corner, just past the light fixture that bites and the Salk Vaccine martini drinking set, was The Solution! For a moderately sensible $395. She called her white leather(ette) siren song to me and before you know it, she was in the Element and on her way home. And now I sit on Luna Schlosser (named after Diane Keaton's character in Sleeper), giggling and typing these words, pondering where in the office I will put the Major Design Award trophies that are going to be piling up at any moment, now that my ass has inspiration.