SPATIAL RELATIONS . . .

I bought new bedsheets the other day. Awesome high thread-count, slightly damask-patterned bedsheets. I washed them tonight, to prepare them and soften them up enough to sleep upon for the first time. I was very excited, for I am currently seeking anything that will help me sleep better and more comfortably at night.

I pulled the warm, fresh-smelling sheets out of the dryer. I shook them out, and carried them into the bedroom to place upon my naked bed. I was very excited for I love the way newly washed bedsheets stretch across the mattress and fit so snugly and cutely on the bed. No bunching, no loose wrinkles. Just pristine smoothness worthy of a military academy. Goodness, I love a neat bed.

It normally only takes me one try to figure out how to lay the bedsheet, but tonight, it took me a couple of tries. The pockets seemed equidistant from each other, but "no," I thought to myself. "I must just be tired and unable to gauge distance correctly." So I proceeded to stretch my beautiful, soft new sheets across my queen-sized mattress.

After a couple of tries, placing the pockets here, then there, then back here again, I had to check the packaging. QUEEN, it read. How odd. I went back to the bed and tried again. Something was wrong.

The fitted bedsheet is a PERFECT SQUARE. I am not joking. No matter which way I attempt to fit the fitted bedsheet, there is about a foot and a half leftover on one side. I turn the sheet 90-degrees. Same foot-and-a-half overhang. And around and around I go, until I have come full-square.

But it gets better, for just as I tuck the extra hang of the bedsheets further under my mattress (doing my best to ignore the oddly placed sheet-pocket nipples -- yeah, you know what I'm talking about and it annoys you just as much as it annoys me), and turn my attention to my beloved pillows, the unthinkable happens. The pillowcases are TOO SMALL for my pillows. Shoving the pillows into these suddenly-miniaturized pillowcases takes me back to freshman year in college, when I insisted on squeezing myself into jeans that were two sizes too small, and looked at my reflection in the mirror and tried to ignore the odd and inappropriate bulges staring back at me. I shove and shove and flap and flap and smoosh and smoosh. Fluffing the pillows afterwards is nonsensical -- they are too tightly packed to fluff. I fear the pillows will turn into diamonds overnight, they are being squeezed so hard.

What can I do? I am far too lazy to go back to the store to return the sheets, complaining that they form a perfect square unfit to fit snugly upon my non-square mattress, and that the pillowcases are about a half size too small for my standard-sized pillows. Far, far too lazy.

So I pray to God that the extra, tucked-in bedsheet won't come loose during the night and make me wake up in a tangle of sweaty cotton. Lord, I despise that sensation. And I pray that I won't injure myself tossing my head on my rock-hard pillows. And I pray that the next time I buy bedsheets -- it might be a while, for this experience, while mildly amusing simply because of its sheer stupidity, has traumatized me a bit -- they won't be perfectly and ridiculously square.