The Third Drawer
The Third Drawer
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days. When I was of that unfortunate age where one gets dragged along on parental shopping excursions, its stores were plentiful and even trendy, which is some feat for a furniture outlet. Then the outlets disappeared, the advertising dropped away, and the Rhodes megastore became somewhat mythologised. Was Rhodes the suburb named after Rhodes the scholarship? Perhaps we’ll never know. If they have anything in common, it’s their inaccessibility. The enclave of Rhodes which borders on Sydney Olympic Park (oh, out there!) has ironically few roads leading in and out of it, forcing traffic into long and narrow queues upon either entrance or escape. It’s a by-product of satellite suburbs, designed to sustain themselves as communities but almost always failing in that aim. At least by any decent definition of community which warrants a degree of identity, atmosphere and vibe. Rhodes doesn’t commit the sin of being mansion-filled sprawl, like so many of Sydney’s contemporary developments. It’s thoroughly modern and metropolitan, with apartment blocks that aren’t depressingly identical in the Huxley-esque way that so many Asian cities build. The paint is still fresh enough that the whole place resembles a diorama of itself. The centrepiece around which Rhodes has settled, tying it reluctantly back to its middle-class suburban reality, is the shopping centre. Unremarkable and small though it may be, it does boast one of Sydney’s two IKEA megastores. It is difficult for me to gauge how universal the IKEA brand is these
Contrary to design conventions, you cannot see an IKEA product from the store’s entrance. There is no indication to the wayward passer-by of what lies within. There is simply an escalator and a small stand housing paper slips and pencils. This is the order form on which you record the particulars of your desires; you can collect the flatpack boxes from the corresponding aisle in the massive warehouse downstairs. From the second you step off that escalator, it is clear what’s going on. You’ve reached the fourth circle of marriage, which traditionally progresses as: engagement > wedding > honeymoon > IKEA. It is illegal to enter an IKEA store as a single person. That’s not unreasonable: single people don’t buy furniture. After all they buy bath salts and silly candles to liven up their soulless studio apartments. Hand-in-hand, parents and parentsto-be saunter around the various displays trying out beds, playing with cupboards, and gawking at lamps. The IKEA showroom is an unending series of rooms: kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms, from which you can pick and choose any number of components. The dreamboat customer walks through the store and just buys three whole rooms. Around me, petty arguments are being conducted in a variety of languages. Some Germans are disagreeing about the colour of a rug while a
By Neha Kasbekar
Chinese couple are bickering about the number of drawers in a bedside table. It’s a veritable melting-pot of ‘working families’ and ‘real Australia’ – the major parties should give up on television and just advertise here. Contrary to expectations, the place was not overrun by lesbians. I was forewarned by some of my contemporaries that the “grinds” (the official collective noun, I’m told) would be out in force, hunting for unassembled furniture or clients in need of a renovation. The crowds were stunningly hetero-normative; this is no Bunnings. Once you’ve completed the circular showroom journey, you head to the downstairs ‘marketplace’ where pallets of disposables await. Crockery, cutlery, linen and ‘storage solutions’ are all in abundance here. It takes another half-hour to navigate the shuffling and indecisive crowds before you emerge, prematurely triumphant, at the real engine-room of this whole operation – the warehouse. The modus operandi of IKEA, in order to provide a happy medium between price and quality, is the flatpack box. Whatever you buy, you build. It will not be delivered by a chain-smoking truckie, but painstakingly assembled by you and your renta-hubby mate whom you coaxed over under the pretence of beer. I breezed through the warehouse and past the checkouts, where fatigued shoppers lean against trolleys full of cardboard boxes and stare despondently at their credit cards. There is one more pit stop to make and that of course is the famed IKEA restaurant. It exists presumably to provide the requisite sustenance for a 10-hour consumption tour-de-force.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way: you’re not going to be able to drop this excellent Ndongan noun into conversation very much at all. Then again, the sheer precision involved in giving a name to this experience warrants a solid 5th-place ranking. Meaning “the urinary problems caused by eating frogs out of season”, ‘oka/shete’ makes for a far more impressive, Bear-Grylls-worthy medical diagnosis than anything we’ve got going.
You certainly wouldn’t dine there for the ambience or the taste, but with $5 meatballs and $2 breakfast on weekends, you could make the case that it exceeds the basest of expectations. This fine establishment even appears on ‘Eatability’, whose reviewers lauded it as ‘better than plane food’.
Bakku-shan (Japanese)
There is also a café selling take-away Swedish food, which, offering hotdogs and donuts, bears an unfortunate resemblance to American food. There is also a range of breads, jams and mulled wine, reminding us of why the term ‘Swedish restaurant’ is deservedly unheard of.
Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
On my way out I pass a large ball-pit where you can dump your children, if only more people would. I think I’ve worked it all out, though, which is of great relief. It’s about the search for perfection, you understand. In a big and complex world full of people with small and insignificant lives, the décor of a room can be an important vestige of power. To that end, IKEA offers a bounty of almost limitless choice. And as these low-altitude aspirants go about building their perfect little lives, with perfect children and perfect love, it’s no surprise they might seek out – however silly the notion might be – a perfect home. Michael Koziol is on Twitter: @michaelkoziol
Lucy Watson irritates her followers
“What do you have to do to get locked out?” I ask. “Oh, post like 100 tweets in an hour or something.” CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
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honi soit
I hurriedly play my last letters and grab my phone. The time? 10:37pm. It begins. I should pause here to extend an apology to all my [few] Twitter followers. My tweets were neither intelligent, nor inspired. They weren’t even terribly interesting. My third tweet? “Wearing insect wings #sexy”. My fourth? “Trolololololol #poo”. My seventh summed up the first six nicely: “I don’t have many structured thoughts at the moment.” After spending the first 14 minutes of the challenge live tweeting my fairly mediocre evening (“Ran into Ellie in the doorway #lol #doorway #Ellie”), my 39th tweet was inspired: “Wings are caught on the door #damn”. This prompted my 40th, “I’m free! #KONY2012”, and so began the rather ridiculous idea of adding #KONY2012 to the rest of my tweets. Naturally, none of them had anything to do with #KONY2012: “There’s an upside down esky here #KONY2012”, “#KONEY-
ISLAND #KONY2012”, “Just realised I misspelt Timberlake #KONY2012”. At tweet 71, 26 minutes in, I lamented “I wanted to do it in twenty five minutes #KONY2012”. Tweet 74, “That took too long to type” was quickly followed by “Oops forgot to #KONY2012 to the last tweet #KONY2012 that’s better #KONY2012”. It’s safe to say that by now, almost everyone hated me, myself included. But I could only get worse, and so decided to mention strangers in my nonsensical tweets. Tweet 108 at minute 37 (WHY HAVEN’T I BEEN LOCKED OUT YET?) read: “@BiggBooty_TRUDY there’s a snake in ma boot! #KONY2012”. Tweet 113: “@ BeholdDeeenster retweet good sir! #KONY2012”. Mentioning strangers soon became too time consuming. My posting speed had slowed from roughly three per minute to closer to two and a half. So I stopped, and instead continued to live
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tweet my evening. Tweet 119: “Locked out #KONY2012”. Tweet 120: “Whoa wrong room #KONY2012”. At 11:20, 43 minutes after I began, I tweeted “Just pumping my guns #KONY2012”. Tweet 127 followed closely behind. “Nomming a cashew #KONY2012”. It wouldn’t post. An error message, saying something along the lines of “Error: Your tweet could not be posted right now. It has been saved in your drafts” appeared. I tried again. Same message. I tried a new tweet, “IT’S TIME TO DANCE TO KELIS! #KONY2012”. Same message. SUCCESS! I had been locked out. It took 126 inspired tweets in 43 minutes, averaging almost three tweets a minute. I was only barred for a measly two hours, after which I finally got to tell the world I had been “Nomming a cashew #KONY2012”. Sorry, Twitter. #KONY2012
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Che Marie Trigg went bobbing for apple ciders
Oka/Shete (Nigerian)
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: TWITTER LOCKOUT It’s Saturday night. A few friends and I are enjoying an average evening playing gangster Scrabble and watching bad 90s pop videos on YouTube. In between Mandy Moore’s “Candy” and a friend playing the word “srzli” (the definition of gangster is interpreted very loosely here) the conversation turns to Twitter. Another friend says, “I follow this really annoying girl, and she keeps posting about how she gets locked out of Twitter for posting too much. And then she posts so many complaints about it that she gets locked out again. It’s kind of a vicious cycle.”
ROAD TEST
Foreign Language Words
Michael Koziol went west of Leichhardt and found the lesbians lacking
Bakku-shan is the Japanese neologism for the disappointing experience of seeing a woman who is roughly a 10 from the back and a 3 from the front. ‘Hold up,’ you say. ‘Isn’t that a little sexist for an addition to a list so esteemed and scientifically rigorous as this one?’ Yes, but so be it. (Farewell, Propriety. ‘Would you know my name, if I saw you in Heaven’.)
This one goes out to all the over-protective parents. In my case, my panoptic, ever-suspicious Indian mother who is so needlessly distrusting of all my opposite-sex relationships that she could only have modelled her views of social dynamics on Avril Lavigne songs (default assumption: “he was a boy; she was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious?” Frankly, yes.) ‘Iktsuarpok’ perfectly describes my mother’s mindset during my late nights away from home, referring, as it does, to the feeling of anticipation that leads you to obsessively keep peering outside to check if anyone’s coming.
Kummerspeck (German) You know those nutrition-obsessed reality TV shows where obese contestants are heartlessly savaged about their weight, almost as though if the words were even remotely minced or sugar-coated, they’d straight-up pork the words down too? The tough-love approach makes me wonder why some contestants don’t just stealthily over-eat under the stress and put on even more weight. Turns out the Germans have a word for it: ‘kummerspeck’, meaning the weight you put on after emotional over-eating. In literal terms: “grief-bacon”.
Pilkunnussija (Finnish) It’s the Finnish equivalent of pedant (a person who adheres rigidly to book knowledge without regard to common sense) but the literal translation of pilkunnussija, “commafucker”, far surpasses the English variant in beauty and succintness. A deserving goldmedallist since it’s both creative and satisfying to say, even if it does leave you at the mercy of that one guy who texts you with, “how r u sxc?” and you inevitably reply: “It’s a good question: how am I sexy? Wherein doth sexiness lie? Probably a combination of genetics, contemporary aesthetic norms and substance abuse of Dove products if I had to venture a guess.” You comma-fucker.
Soundtrack to: The worst house party ever Matt Clarke had a pretty shit time tbh
‘Sober’ – Pink For some reason you thought it would be a good idea to drive to this party. I mean it’s all the way on the North Shore and you have work the next morning! Turns out this was not such a good idea. Someone has loaded the iPod with Skrillex and you’re completely sober to hear it. This is going to be a long night.
‘Who Are You?’ – The Who Get used to asking this a lot, because you don’t know anyone at this party. You arrive with your friend who promptly disappears for the rest of the night leaving you to make awkward small talk with strangers.
‘Teenagers’ – My Chemical Romance When your friend said that their ‘housemate’ had invited some people, you didn’t realise that housemate meant ‘younger brother.’ This is a particularly depressing moment when you realise you’re spending your Saturday night with seventeen year olds who are drinking red wine out of plastic cups. Hang in there.
‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ – Sophie Ellis Bextor Things really start to get weird at this point. Janie looked like she was having such a good time until she went all crazy and starting shooting people. I mean, what the hell?
‘Leave (Get Out)’ – JoJo
Bulmers Widely available even in the seediest of establishments, Bulmers is to cider what Tooheys New is to beer. Not unpleasant, yet not at all remarkable, it will scratch your cider itch but there are others that will do the job better. It is akin to soda water with a dash of apple cordial, rendering it quite dull and leaving no aftertaste. I thought maybe I was being unfair, so I polled my cider drinking friends, and found that they all agree: Bulmers is overpriced and tasteless. Recommended only when no other choices are present. 4/10
Five Seeds Speaking of Tooheys, Five Seeds is the cider produced by said beer brand. To put it plainly, there is no way this should be as ubiquitous as its beer counterpart. As I sipped upon the pale gold drink in Manning Bar, each sip became harder to swallow. Perhaps my expectations were too high as the bartenders were wearing Five Seeds shirts- surely they wouldn’t endorse this injustice to the cider name?! But then as the distate in my mouth grew, I realised it was because Five Seeds cider tastes like petrol. So much so that it’s lucky the campus is now smoke-free, because if Five Seeds drinkers were to exhale too heavily near an open flame they would burn their face off. 2/10
Monteith’s Hailing from across the ditch, this New Zealand cider proves that Kiwis can produce something other than sheep - and do it well. Each sip of Monteith cider is like taking a bite from a fresh, crisp, juicy apple. One minor problem, however, is the smaller sized bottles than the other ciders- more on par with a Bacardi Breezer than its cider peers. But Monteith proves size ain’t everything and impresses with its delicious golden goodness. Monteith’s does its country proud. 8/10
Rekordelig Cold nations sure do know their cider. Far and away the greatest cider this amateur reviewer has tasted, Rekordelig is perfect to warm up on cold winter evenings or cool down on sweltering summer nights. Sweet and tangy, Rekordelig never gets to be too much and always satisfies. While it comes in a plethora of flavours: Strawberry and Lime, Pear, Mixed Berry and Apple and Blackcurrant, the traditional Apple cider tested for this review proved to be delicious and tangy despite the lack of exoticism displayed by the other flavours. 9/10
It’s time to do something you should have done a long time ago. You can hear the vague sound of police sirens in the distance, and Janie’s running out of targets. It’s time to leave. Seriously.
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honi soit
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