lviii

“Laundry day, see you there, under-things tumbling/Wanna say, “Love your hair.”/Here I go, mumbling.

-Dr. Horrible

            I’m no good doing my own laundry.

            It should come as no surprise, really. I’ve never been very good at the more, for lack of a better word, matronly aspects of daily routine; my room is still recovering from the past week of clutter neglect and my refrigerator reeks of steak tacos, as they slowly wither away in the back Styrofoam corner of my personal mini-Hoth locker. I blame it on the excessive amounts of testosterone.

            I have discovered that mid-afternoon on a Saturday is the best time to enter the dingy laundry room, because it is empty and quiet. While everyone is getting ready for the evening’s festivities, with alcohol or without, I am alone with the four washers and six dryers, waiting for my impossibly-sixty-minute cycle to end.

            My LAUNDRYDAYBOOK, the one that I lug downstairs every week, is The Habit of Being, a collection of letters by the probably-senile Flannery O’Connor. It was a gift for my eighteenth birthday and I have not touched it since. The binding creases are non-existent, resting in the paper shadows for a gentle touch and a smooth bend in their threadings, as I finally find something of note, of audible importance, of mental-note application to my own life.

            Luckily, I haven’t shrunken any of my clothes, yet. Apparently, though, I have used over half of my teddy-bear-emblazoned fabric softener bottle in only one wash load, leaving my batch reeking of flowers and spring and whatever other chemical smells that have been witch-brewed into the plastic cap. I need to take my head out of my LAUNDRYDAYBOOK, a book that I have no hope of understanding,  just once in a while, and pay attention to my surroundings, and pay attention to the slow spinning wardrobe in front of me, which is obviously having a much worse, much soapier day that I am.