My fourth year at the Medical University of Gdansk has come to a close, finishing our last exam extra early this year. Four years down, two to go! I am treating myself to a few glorious days of freedom and relaxation before diving into a summer of full-time study for the USMLE Step 1 (United States Medical Licensing Exam– more on that later).
In between napping on my sunny balcony, eating salmon omelettes for brunch, and sipping Prosecco in the warm summer evening, I’ve had a few errands to run. Among these was my final return to the creepy basement of doom.
Holiday feeling for a few days
I will preface this anecdote by expressing my gratitude to the friend who let me store my things in the basement of her apartment this year (you know who you are, tack så mycket!).
When my boyfriend and I moved last September, we ended up having some extra things that we didn’t need in the new apartment. I sold textbooks, a mirror, cutlery, even two pairs of shoes. But the one thing I could not sell was this piece of furniture, which I call a “kitchen countertop shelving unit” for lack of a better word:
“Kitchen countertop shelving unit,” which was perfect in our old apartment but doesn’t fit in our current home
Then my friend told me she was moving, and I had to get my things out of her basement. It took some convoluted decision-making and planning. Finally, it was concluded that the best way to deal with this countertop thing was to take it apart and store the pieces under our bed. The biggest obstacle was that I had to take care of it by myself; everyone who could have helped me was either moving, leaving town, or studying for exams.
I realize when I put it into words, it doesn’t sound like a very impressive task: taking apart a few pieces of wood and carrying them up the stairs into a taxi. The thing is, I have never built a piece of IKEA furniture by myself, let alone take it apart. Usually, the person who has the most experience in assembling IKEA furniture is the one who gets the job done, while the other assists clumsily by passing the screwdriver and holding wooden boards upright (the second person is me).
To make the task more interesting, I was to tackle this project in a dark, dank, dusty basement with a funny smell and an abundance of spiders. It would have been easier to carry the countertop out of the basement and take it apart above ground, but there was no way for me to carry it up the stairs by myself. The deconstruction had to take place in the basement.
This basement really freaks me out. It feels like the perfect hangout for a mean gang of rats, the kind who watch you from the rafters with their beady eyes, waiting for the chance to jump into your hair or run up your leg… After numerous visits to this creepy basement, I developed a habit of stamping my feet and humming loudly to scare away rats with my human noises.
So, off I went! I tap danced noisily on the concrete stairs as the dim stairwell light cast eerie shadows on the walls. The lights in the low ceiling don’t work in corridor below, so I dragged the heavy countertop out of the storage space by light of a borrowed headlamp and my cellphone flashlight. Then, feeling like a monkey with a toolbox, I scrutinized at the structure and contemplated where to begin.
Screws… should be un-screwed… Nails… need to be hammered out of the backboard… and then yanked out with the thing on the back of the hammer… Then there were some things that looked like larger flat screws which tightened when I turned them both ways and loosened somewhere in the middle. Those last ones were puzzling until the very last step when I discovered tiny triangular arrows which had to be pointed in one direction before lifting/hammering off the thing it was attached to. I was thankful that my only spectators were spiders (and maybe a few hidden rats), because I felt completely idiotic and rather embarrassed to be posing as someone who knows how to use a toolbox.
To my surprise, slowly but surely the pieces came apart. Success! The spiders gave me a round of applause as I wiped my dusty forehead. It may not have been an amazing accomplishment, but it was definitely a personal achievement. It was the first time I had tackled IKEA furniture with a toolbox, all on my own. Not a huge accomplishment in reality, but let me take pride in these first steps.
There are still a lot of things that I want to learn how to do. Sometimes I feel like I spend so much time as a student learning how to know stuff, that I block out all the time I might spend learning how to do stuff. For instance, I still want to learn how to grow tomatoes, build a fence, and mend knitted wool socks. Until then, at least I know that I can take apart a kitchen countertop shelving unit in near-darkness, under the intense scrutiny of spiders and possibly rats!
The Life of All Sorts 