Suck It: Launderamas & Frat Boys

Adventures in Laundromatland--the long version

The Man and I have an on-again off-again agreement about the laundry--he does it, and I don't bitch at him about the fact that he does precious little else around the house. This isn't exactly a great deal for me, but I accept it because I fucking hate laundromats, and one of the less charming features of living in our cute little bungalow in this cute little beach community is that we have to truck our dirty gear to laundry facilities. I've been doing the laundromat thing more often than not since early childhood, and I'm just OVER it.

Also, his housekeeping skills leave something to be desired--such as the creation of actual cleanliness.

But, this little bargain means that the laundry gets done when 1) he has time off and 2) its piled so high and deep that the dirty clothes actual pose an active hazard when trying to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. This usually corresponds with subsidiary conditions 3 (one or both of us runs out of underwear) and 4 (our bedroom begins to smell like blue cheese, only without the charm.) It requires a little patience and a fair amount of actively choosing not to grow annoyed in order to allow the laundry to reach the top of his priority list on its own. I usually succeed in keeping my mouth shut--more or less--until he gets there. Occasionally, I begin to nag, and this typically results in a stand-off in which we both try to out-wait the other, and the loser ends up listening to "Lite Jazz" for three hours of mind-numbingly tedious fluff & fold.

This time, I lost.

Now, to be fair, tomorrow's his birthday, and I did actively encourage him to slack when he offered to do it last Sunday. So, I don't really resent doing it this one time. Besides, I'm out of underwear, and I can no longer stomach the stench. I was starting to dream about our dirty towels achieving sentience and launching a full scale offensive. (Given their relative proximity to our sleeping area, they have us at a distinct disadvantage.)

I should mention at this point that it's been more than a month since laundry was last done around here. A month during which it has been t-shirt soakingly hot and Turkish bath house humid--sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both at once. And we had a party. And a houseguest. The result? Thirteen--count em, THIRTEEN--brimmingly full loads of washing. That breaks down to two enormous and overloaded hamper/baskety things and four lawn-clippings sized Hefty bags, or four trips back and forth from the casa just to get it all into the car. I was filled with anticipatory joy from the outset, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Because I had to wait around all morning for a phone call, I didn't manage to cram myself into the laundry pile I used to call my car until around 1pm. So, for extra fun, mountains of laundry during the peak heat of the day. "No problem," I thought. "It's a nice sunny day, and the middle of the week and all. The place will be empty, and I'll be in and out in 2 hours." I am, it should be noted, a fantastically efficient folder of clothes--far more so than the boy, which is a never-voiced point of pride on my end and pique on his. (A few months in a hotel laundry really ups your folding speed.) Thus did my pride in this most banal of competencies precede my ungainly tumble. In other words, pride goeth before the fall.

Incidentally, does anybody know why it's "goeth" anyway? It's such a silly and anachronistic word to preserve. But, I digress.

After hauling my mountains o' things into the local Launderama, I remembered that I was out of the hypoallergenic detergent I prefer, so I went next door to the 7-11 to pick up some supplies. I've done this dozens of times in the past, because I have a lousy memory for such things. Typically they carry my brand, and I quite happily pay their inflated prices in order to insure that I'm never obligated to make detergent a purchasing priority in my life. Today, of course, they were out of my brand. The only brand left, as it happens, was Tide. I am mildly allergic to Tide. Just allergic enough, as it turns out, that when forced to choose between an intermittently occuring mild rash until next laundry day and piling everything back in the car to go in search of better detergent (only to have to unload it all again), I chose the rash.

Sub-par supplies in hand, I headed back for the laundromat. The population was blessedly minimal, so I had my choice of washing machines. With a month's worth of laundry, the multi-loaders were looking very good to me. Plus, we mostly wear dark colors and perma-press fabrics, so much of our stuff can comfortable bathe together, and the multi-loaders are cheaper in the long run. Three single loads of delicates, whites, and other oddities commenced their cycles. Two triple loaders of everyday clothes and jeans also got underway without incident. And then came the showdown with the MegaLoader.

This machine is, on your average day, a joy. I can cram all my towels, dark sheets, and miscellaneous cheap clothes of the indeterminately dark family of colors in there together. It's five loads in one! It's, well, it's practically a Better Homes ad from the fifties...it's a model of efficiency, a time and money saver! See your clothes through the viewing window; marvel as you actually witness the cleaning action! It's the machine age, making modern living better, turning dreary housework into a techonological adventure! Plus, they take less soap. I use them often, and I've never had problems.

Today, of course, it broke. Of course, it didn't break early, when I could just take everything out and put it in another machine. And, it didn't break late, when I could have just said "to hell with the final spin" and gone straight for the dryer. No, like that bitch Goldilocks, it was right in the damn middle--post-wash and mid-rinse, to be exact. Insert twenty minutes of negotiation with the Head Laundress In Charge, a diverting if frustrating attempt to figure out if my Spanish skills were better or worse than her English skills (I think we were pretty even), and a refund. Now, the functional washers are finished with my clothes and making those urgent little cheeps that such things do when their timers expire. So, move all that stuff into a bunch of dryers, then return to my soap-filled sodden five loads in the MegaLoader.

After wresting the dripping mess from the gaping jaws of the original machine, I got it redistributed into two smaller machines and restarted. This meant that those five loads would be running 35 minutes behind everything else, but I rationalized that I can't fold thirteen loads at once anyway, so it would just stagger my dryer use a bit and not cost me too much time. (Despite the minor setback to my timetable, there was no way I was throwing a Tide-infested sodden heap into the dryers. I stand by my decision.)

Twenty minutes later, I'm at the primo folding table right in front of the dryers; it's hot and humid there, but it's the biggest and cleanest table, and it's a great spot from which to cull the finished clothes from one's multiple dryers--a must for minimizing the lagtime between dry and folded and repackaged. The semi-delicates are mostly done and folding has commenced. "The washers should be about done," I naively mused as I finished folding a load and headed for the twice-washed duds.

One of the washers was stopped.
And it was stopped mid-cycle.

So, beginning to get a headache from the humidity and noise, I started another round of Mad-Libs with the woman in charge. I got the finished wash into dryers, got the other clothes going again (this time, she got the machine to resume, and may the gods praise her for it.) and resumed folding. Due to the time lost, however, I fell behind in the folding and actually had a couple of dryers run out of time on me, which never happens.

Somewhere in here, the clouds rolled in from the coast. Humidity shot up exponentially. A vanload full of strange frat boy clones came in with mountains of --here's the weird part -- already washed clothes. In direct opposition to the rest of the partial-facilities world, they apparently had a washer but not a dryer and were in dire need of about a dozen of them. And right now, thank you very much. But, lo and behold, I and another woman suffering the wrath of the washing-machine gods were in sole possession of some 20 dryers. Whining ensued, followed by bitching, and then subterfuge as they teamed up to divert those of us who selfishly put only one load of clothes in each dryer while another went around and opened a half dozen dryers, unceremoniously dumping all the contents into a couple of baskets. By the time we realized this, of course, they already had four dryers spinning away, full to bursting with their shit. Meanwhile, six loads of stuff were tossed together in two big piles--belonging to me and two other people, I might add.

Now comes the fifteen tedious minutes of trying to sort out what belonged to whom. The few things of mine that were still too wet to pass off as finished, I distributed among my other dryers. (Though they were in the wrong and deserved a good tongue-lashing, among other and harsher punishments, I'd already lost too much time to their games and no longer cared to fight. I mildly regret this decision, as they really were the worst kind of assholes.) My head was, by this point, pounding in time to the sound of tumbling cylinders. No longer optimistic but still hoping to minimize my laundry-induced suffering and give D a little Happy Birthday nod of the uninspired but still touching variety, I resumed my cull-and-fold efforts.

As the last of the clothes hit the dryer, it began to sprinkle. Nearly simultaneously, the laundromat filled with people. Baskets lined the aisles and snarlish faces hunched over every surface. Time seemed to speed up and slow down simultaneously, stretching almost infinite before me as I steadily culled and condensed dryers and folded the Amazing Unshrinking Pile. Buzzers buzzed intermittently, setting off new chain reactions of thumping in my brain. Now completely defeated, I added coins whenever the machines demanded them, my spirit broken.

In a last-ditch effort to cut down on my time in this purgatorial void called Grand Street Fluff & Fold, I hauled each container out to my car as it was filled with folded laundry. At last I pulled the last items from the last dryers. Deciding on the spur of the moment that I simply couldn't take any further abuse at the hands of the laundry demons, I dumped the last load, unfolded, into a bag. Feeling equally inclined to whoop with the joy of hard-won accomplishment and cry with frustrated pain and an overwhelming sense of futility, I headed home a mere four hours after arriving.

I knew it couldn't get worse, but was actively refraining from thinking such a jinxing thing just as I was starting to see the light at the bottom of the hamper. But, it turns out that life did begin to improve almost immediately.

Having promised myself a late lunch filled with fatty goodness as reward for my efforts, I hurriedly hauled everything inside before my french fries could cool and therein destroy the delicate balance of crunchy-but-still-greasy that makes them worth risking a heart attack for. Five minutes after I got home, while I was munching french fries, having a smoke and trying to stop sweating, it started to rain more aggressively. The temperature dropped, the breeze (previously nonexistent) picked up, the skies darkened to that storm-front near twilight which (for some unknown reason) facilitates my being able to see most clearly.

If I were a betting woman, I'd bet that at that same moment, the laundromat emptied of patrons and all the machines spontaneously healed themselves.

I think it may be time to stock up on underwear.

Suck It: Hipster Novels

I picked up David Bledin's Bank purely because it was already on the bookshelf and it looked like a light, easily discardable read to take on the plane. It was pleasant enough, as far as it went. But, it didn't really go anywhere. Nothing happens. It chronicles more Starbucks trips than anything else, and the characters ultimately learn...that investment bankers are douchebags. Why, what a revelation! How can this possibly take 300 pages to realize? Also, what made anyone think that the rest of the world is interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the monkeys manning the spreadsheets for mega-capital megaliths?

After pondering these mysteries through the entire second half of the novel (I have this inability to walk away from even the most soul-deadeningly mediocre of entertainment once I've started it), I reached the end, and an Afterword that made me angry, confused, and sad. Apparently, this novel began as a whiny email circulated amongst financial district drones carping about their long hours and demeaning jobs. I gather they've never cleaned toilets, mucked horse stalls, or done any other actual labor, but that's beside the point. The real point is that this email landed the young Mr. Bledin first an agent and then a novel publication.

And it's hardly the first time. I've read a handful of novels and memoirs which began their life online. That's lovely. I don't even blame the semi-enterprising individuals who turned their boring ass lives into boring ass blogs and then boring ass books. No. I blame us, the reading public, who are so lazy that we want to read a blog in book form--because it will lay down with us on the beach without costing us a grand in repairs. I blame us, too, for thinking that a twenty-three year old with BY HIS OWN ADMISSION no experience 0utside adolescence and then ninety hour weeks in a cubicle would have anything new or interesting to impart.

This is part of a trend of giving annoying hipster twenty-somethings contracts to spend two years in a dead-end job, and then parlay their brief excursion in paid labor into a multi-media empire of pseudo-celebrity. It must stop, before Barnes & Noble starts shoving down our throats the adventures of a twenty-year old barista who, like, really really thinks making cappucinos is hard and stuff.