Sofa Shopping

   There is a special place in hell for people who force oppressed persons (like their children) to go sofa shopping with them. Maybe "hell" is too harsh, considering that I don't want my beloved parents to go to that place, but I think we can all agree that sofa shopping is some kind of cruel and nefarious punishment.
   When I was roughly fourteen my parents decided it was time for a new sofa. And they made me come with them. For two consecutive weekends. This might not sound that bad. Picture this: driving through Scarborough (raaaaatchet) in the unseasonably cold April weather, hitting up every Leon's imaginable (why are there so many out there? Only god knows) all under the guise of being a "family adventure". There is nothing adventurous about a brown pleather sofa. There is nothing family-oriented about it either. If anything, more families have been torn apart through the process of trying to acquire new living room sets than anything other leading cause of divorce and/ or estrangement.
   Over the course of those two weekends I learned more about human relationships than I have ever learned. Like if you're looking carefully enough, you can literally read on a person's face the precise moment they become totally fed up with something. Also, I'm pretty sure furniture stores are one of those few places on earth where people lose all social standards and will blatantly yell at people around them.
   For me, the weirdest part about being taken sofa shopping was that I had to go despite rarely being consulted and whenever I was actually asked for an opinion it was more a formality. Rightly so, as a very G-rated punk, what did I know about the benefits of suede versus imitation suede versus imitation imitation suede. Eventually I just started saying I liked everything and can we go now. There were no responses.
   The very worst part of it all was that after all this deliberation and field research, the prospective sofas just festered in my parents' brains until they came to some conclusion on their own that I was not a part of. Which would have been fine with me were it not for the thirty-six plus hours of my life that had already been sacrificed to the sofa shopping gods. For the record, I'm still waiting for those gods to send me something good.