As I get closer to my move (Friday! And Sunday! But not Saturday, because I'm judging high school speech!), I am realizing more and more how skewed my perceptions are on what life should cost. Last night I went shopping for a mattress and possibly a couch, and ended up paying so much for a mattress (that was already on closeout!) that it scared me away from buying any more furniture.
Somehow I thought I could get away with paying $300 for a mattress set and have it be comfortable and high quality. Well, let me tell you about the $300 mattress sets. They're either wicked springy and squashy, or they come stacked in suspicious piles in the middle of a Home Goods store and you can't try them out. I ended up paying about three times that (including a bed frame, delivery and tax) for an excellent queen-sized set. And it FREAKED ME OUT. But considering my current bed situation is a free mattress with a memory foam topper I got as a gift on an $80 IKEA bed frame, anything above $80 was going to shock me anyway.
After I finished calling friends to freak out, I stopped feeling like I was going to cry every time I looked at my receipt. When I bought my computer a year or so ago, I had a similar moment of needing to rationalize spending more at once than I ever had in my life. But prior to that, my computer was a blue Jeff Goldblum-in-the-commercials-era iMac I'd gotten from a former coworker for $55. So I think this is just another case of me needing to just get the eff over it and realize that becoming an adult with non-crappy life items is not free. And if I'm going to spend a lot of money on any furniture, it's going to be my mattress, considering how much I hate getting out of bed. And after less than three years, it will be a dollar per day if we look at this purchase in my favorite way, which is price per use.
While I'm happy to have a great new bed, this means I'm holding off on getting a couch. Instead, I'm getting a slipcover and a U-Haul and keeping my current one, which was free to begin with.
So am I the last person on Earth to learn that life costs money? Did anyone else experience it as kind of a cruel slap in the face? I'm filled with a new appreciation for my parents buying enough furniture to fill each of their houses growing up. No wonder they made me support my own clothes habit in high school.
