Posts Tagged ‘ikea’
Some Assembly Required
When I was in high school I wasn’t very good at writing essays. (Yeah, bestselling novelist now! Take that Mrs. Finane!) Okay, Mrs. Finane had a point – I DON’T do a good five-paragraph essay. Never have, probably never will. What this meant was that I was bounced out of Advanced English every other year. In the regular English classes I got to diagram sentences and . . . take the ASVAB. (That’s the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.) Apparently, if you couldn’t write a good essay, you should check out the military.
Since the ASVAB didn’t care if you could write a 5PE, I scored really well. I can diagram sentences like there is no tomorrow. Throw me a vocab word! I can also fold those odd cut-outs into 3D shapes really well. And there was a mechanics section, too – where should the fulcrum go? What’s the blast radius? How much rope and how many pullies does it take to get enough of a mechanical advantage for a small native boy to lift a wounded 300 lb soldier on a back brace?
Who knew that I had this kind of aptitude? Actually, I could have told you this. In my family, there’s a point of pride about knowing how to put something together . . . without the instructions. I can’t tell you how many futons I helped build or repair in my college days. Yes, you can stack the beds in your dorm room, but you have to go to Home Depot and get the right size dowel, and – if you’re smart – some braces and a few wood screws, but don’t tell them I told you that.
