Take It From Me, It's Impossible To Build A Chair

I know what you're thinking. "I'm tired of always buying chairs for me and my friends to sit down. I can build my own chair! How hard can it be?" Well, I found myself asking the same question just two weeks ago and believe me, it is literally impossible to build a chair. 

To be honest, I don't know where they're coming from or what kind of magical creature is spitting these things out, but all I know is that no person can possibly build one of these things with their own two hands. I've spent a large amount of time studying them too. I looked at the way they were basically constructed, and then moved on to figuring out the similarities between all the different designs. Once you start looking at the "folding" or the "rolling" chairs, you've completely lost me. I set out to make a simple, stationary, sitting chair. 

Most of the chairs I own are made out of wood, so I figured I would need some of that. I swung by the Home Depot and told them that I needed to pick up some lumber to build a chair. The woman at the store looked at me and simply said, "You're building your own chair? Good luck!" That should've been my first warning sign, but I didn't let that deter me. After all, I was a man who had once figured out how to turn my own hand into a rubber band gun. 

Once I was home, I tried cutting the pieces of wood into what roughly looked like they would go on a chair. That part wasn't too hard, but I fear the ease that I experienced early on gave me a false sense of bravado that would ultimately be my downfall. I cockily placed my newly-cut chair parts in a pile, believing that the answer to how these pieces fit together would simply come to me. 

The answer never came. 

I pushed on anyway, thinking that sticking the pieces together would ultimately make the solution clearer, much like the process of building a puzzle. I used glue at first, but the pieces of the chair fell apart. Then, I tried nails. The pieces were holding together, but there were nails everywhere. I was losing hope. 

After two weeks of extensive trial-and-error, I came to the hopeless realization that this was just never going to happen. I would never have the experience of sitting in a chair that I built myself. It wasn't all bad, though. Through this process, I have also come to appreciate the little things in life that come to us from unknown places. How do we get chairs if we know they are impossible to build? Nobody really knows. All we can know is that the chairs are there, and that we can never make them ourselves. 

Chairs, wherever you come from, thank you.