inadequacies in bas (boy) relief

So it turns out that, in all my long years of solitude, a few things with which I have always been perfectly content are actually subpar, which apparently you only notice in the context of dating someone.  (Crap, that sounds like backdoor bragging doesn't it?)  I've always, for example, been quite fond of my couch.  I didn't even have a real couch until I moved back to Erie from South Bend; for the first half-decade of my adulthood I made do with a brown-orange-and-white floral 1970s relic loveseat covered in a beige sheet, leftover from my college dorm room days.  But upon returning home, I was given possession of my grandmother's couch.  As a sofabed, it weighs approximately as much as a piano, and its blue and gray upholstery matches nothing but faded jeans, but swathed in a stellar green slipcover it looks perfectly respectable, and is, I always fancied, quite comfortable.

Enter a boyfriend.

I invited Chris over a few weeks ago for dinner and movies.  Dinner went easily enough, sitting side by side on the couch bent over our plates on the coffee table.  But then we pushed the dishes aside and went about settling in for movie-watching cuddling.  After twenty uncomfortable minutes of fidgeting and shifting like unjointed tinker toys, I faced an uncomfortable truth:  My couch actually sucks.  Narrow, hard and unyielding as a slab of sidewalk, it makes cuddling practically impossible in any arrangement.

Also my TV is way too small.  It's maybe 19", and until you spend a lot of time with someone whose TV is 42" (now 50"), you don't realize just how postage-stamp-sized that is.  It never bothered me all that much, but now there's that awkwardness that creeps in when I invite Chris over:  "Heyyyy, wanna come over...and...watch....um...movies?" and I imagine I can practically hear him making mental comparisons with prison cells and Super 8 motel rooms.

Fortunately he comes over anyway.  I love my apartment, and while I scratched my finances into better shape this year, I still don't have enough for a new couch or TV.  Which is a shame, because I try to avoid the wall of TVs every time I go to the superstore, but while Christmas shopping I discovered the utter, stunning, intelligence-draining beauty of 4K Ultra HD (thankfully there's no reason to buy one yet since there isn't a ton of Ultra HD content available).

Some day, Gussie Mouseheimer.  Someday...

In the meantime, I have a spartan couch and television screen.  Because at thirty-three I am still poor and roughing it and almost all of my things are secondhand.  (And my couch and television were both free.)