Trying to furnish an apartment is a difficult task. I know the latest model of modern man is both equally programmed to stylishly design any interior and is probably also dishwasher-safe, but I was constructed before any of these advances and cannot even manage the interior design of my refrigerator.

I guess it's kind of a problem.

When I visit almost any of my friends' apartments, I find they have coordinated each piece of furniture with every other - the deep walnut-colored table matches the deep walnut-colored shelves, which both inevitably match their deep walnut-colored mail pouch signs.

Their places also have accent pieces, too - the subtler, decorative touches that give a space a personal, comfortable feel, like picture frames, overhead lighting, and socket covers. But as much as I wish I had either the means or inclination to buy a fur-covered headboard or designer wall sconces, I just can't sleep when I know there are children in India with drab, unadorned walls. Even the shallow dirt hole Saddam bunkered in probably had fancier accoutrements than my apartment.

I did once consider splurging on a toilet cozy, but everybody told me that toilet cozies are not fancy at all, but are instead very grandmotherly. Whatever, my grandmother didn't have carpet on her toilet seat.

Granted - and I don't mean to cast any dispersions - these friends buy all their furniture from Ikea, what I think is the Danish word for "shoddy craftsmanship," but obviously durability is not the primary concern of a generation that spends an entire paycheck on jeans that look like they were on the losing end of a fracas with a wood mulcher.

No, how it all looks together is what matters, and the only furniture I've had at this location that has matched were the two moving boxes I used as a coffee table and a nightstand, respectively. At the very least, I've since thrown away and replaced those boxes with… well, I've thrown away those boxes. But even now, what furniture I have is but a mishmash of fake Camel Signs, road cones,  and bread racks, and I still have no hanging pictures or ornamental bamboo vases, giving my apartment all the domestic charm of a lumber mill storehouse.

And most galling to me is that I'm still sleeping on a twin-size bed. Most people, even during college, finally invested in, at the very least, a double bed. I had one, however lost in all the mishap of my life, and am now sleeping on the same mattress I used when I was five. It's not that I even need this space for a significant other, goodness no. I just want to be able to sleep splayed out on my chest, with fingers and toes at each of the four corners. Is this so much to ask? Is this to be endured?

But then what do I do? Sit here in the floor which serves as a desk and type away in a melancholy with neither toilet cozy or coffee table and nary a wall sconce in sight? I need furniture, and badly. I've given up on trying to make my apartment stylish and am satisfied with making it look habitable. And I confess that I may have, on occasion, walked pas the waterlogged couches with mysterious brown sploches that line the student housing section of Marshall and considered, hey, you know, a few throw pillows over those cat urine stains and it may not look so bad.

And though I'm sure I could pull a few strings with a few well-connected gay friends and enlist the aid of the design world's favorite argument for birth control, Bobby Trendy, but I just don't think I could afford to have my made "sumptuous" with the addition of lots of fake pink polyester fur. I'd feel too much like I was living inside a giant art deco uterus and really that's no better than what I have now.

So where do people find relatively inexpensive furniture that won't collapse when I turn on the vacuum and isn't something so hideous even a frat house would reject it? Do such things exist, or do I have to purchase them with magical elf currency in order to procure them?

I'm told that many people, however, endure ugly, hand-me-down couches as the first phase of living on one's own. I guess when I have a bajillion million dollars, no doubt from my rousing success at Coldstone, I can finally move into the fancy-name furniture phase of life, when I have armoires instead of dressers, bureaus instead of desks, and nightstands instead of the resilient underside of a moving box.

And maybe a toilet cozy too, if I'm really lucky.