last night gino and i bade goodbye to our two purple couches. after three+ years of service on both their parts, traveling from college residences to young adulthood, sitting in a stadium-style two-tiered arrangement for football games and movie nights (goodbye to you as well, cinder blocks!), and hugging the walls, getting trampled, stepped, danced and spilled on party after party, it was time to move on.

now we take the giant leap into carpet cleaning, couch upgrading, and eventually new-tv-buying, as we transition out of the ‘free stuff we got from some guy’ phase and into the vaunted ikea-centric mid twenties. oh to be one notch above the bottom. although the few days of transition are quite funny, as the two of us sit on foldable beach chairs in the middle of our wide open living room, inches above the not yet unsoiled carpet, watching late night with conan just as we did that first year back in ’03. aaaah, memories.

part of me is hoping someone will come and rescue our couches from the curb, giving them another loving home before the los angeles department of public works comes to cart them off to their inevitable destruction. or perhaps we should have had a funeral pyre ourselves, to commemorate all those loving afternoons of calling seat-save or brushing nacho crumbs off between touchdowns. my best idea was to covertly set them up on the roof of the car dealership right outside our balcony, where we could look fondly down at them and chuckle at our absurd prank, but the lack of ladders and the surprising heaviness of furniture proved to be an obstacle. mostly i just hope that when i get home today they are already gone, whisked off to a better place where i can imagine them still happily cradling blissful youth as they intently watch sopranos or cheer for the home team, instead of arriving to find them the temporary bed and bathroom for swarthy hobos. [shudder]