Laundromats

As previously divulged, I'm not so good at running laundry; you might say it's not my strongest suit.

[Pausing for groans]

There is, of course, my uncanny ability to shrink the perceivably unshrinkable -- but it's more than that. I don't have the patience to run laundry like a normal person should, centralizing all focus on the minute details of how long articles of clothing should run in this and with that. And I feel enslaved indoors, locally repressed to sprinting distance of the washer and dryer for the two hours or so required for a full cycle. To me, it's simply annoying.

But it ain't like doing laundry in a laundromat. God, no. Now that's miserable.

Talk about enslavement, at laundromats you are bound and confined within three feet at most of your most precious, cotton-threaded commodities on spin cycle. Bring a book or a smartphone that's not a Droid Eris because it's about to get boring, folks.

While studying abroad in London for a semester in college, the hotel in which I slept, discovered Facebook, and gambled away entirely too much of a friend's monetary credits on an online poker site (sorry again, Tanner) had a laundry room, but a predetermined pink soap automatically fed into the machines without the launderer's objection. So, because I have hypersensitive skin (as if regular skin layered beneath my natural red hair wouldn't be faint and feeble enough), I have to use that "free and clear," a.k.a. raise-a-white-flag-to-eighty-five-percent-of-the-periodic-table-of-elements, formula with which to wash my clothes, which also meant I had to weekly travel by bus to a laundromat and pay higher costs while guarding my clothes like they were the crown jewels a river away. Needless to say, I had a tremendous amount of time on my hands to ogle Londoners, practice my British dialect by calling the most ordinary things "smashing" and "brilliant," and stare deeply into the tumbling clothes while wondering why I crossed an ocean to sit and guard laundry for several hours each week.

Similar feelings of valuelessness, discontent, and general banality followed me to my first apartment out of college, which had no washer or dryer connections -- an amenity you think I'd have nailed down by then as a must-have. So, I spent each Sunday afternoon in the communal laundromat. I didn't just memorize the number of ceiling tiles (86 1/4); I knew the ceiling's every imperfection and splotch of mold by heart. Those hours of the week sucked. Probably the worst way to come off my Jesus high from church that morning.

And so with these and other less-than-pleasant visits in pocket, I am convinced that you cannot have fun in a laundromat. It harbors a constant state of mental and emotional anguish. Seriously, have you seen the people waiting on their laundry in one of these places? They're frowning with facial muscles they didn't know they had. It's about as much fun as a dry county.

I guess it could be worse -- we could be scrubbing our clothes with a bar of soap against a washboard in the middle of a creek. Then again, that's probably free of detergent perfumes and dyes, isn't it? Hmm...