A word of warning… After reading this, you may hesitate to be seen with me in public. I just had to get this out, though. I must say, it was nice knowing you all.
Washing clothes is an important event, but there are way too many decisions to be made in the process, too many choices and options. Surely you have thought of laundry as a burdensome chore, and you must have plenty of your own thoughts about the act. Here are mine.
First, the doctrine of separating clothing by color strikes me as falsely premised. I realize that my whites wont get to be “whiter whites”, but isn’t that a reflection of white supremacy? Really, though, I’ve not noticed a significant degradation of the light reflecting values of my white shirts after laundering alongside my dark T-shirts. Some clothing is supposed to be washed with “like colors”. I am sensing a theme here - laundry apartheid. I only obey this command when it is easily executed, if I have time, and the article of clothing is dear to my heart. Otherwise, if I am in a hurry, it’s “in ya' go, Suzie”.
The two machines used to “do” laundry are worthy of our attention. They are in a way polar opposites, yin and yang, or day I breach the topic of gender and engage in stereotyping, male and female. The washing machine, in my mind, is the male. He is rough, and forces the clothes into a condition of wetness, sometimes in scalding water, but often in cold water. The washing machine “waterboards” the clothing, and soaks them in chemicals. The clothes are tossed around, tumbled violently, and then viciously spun to remove the water and chemicals. Admittedly, the soils – body oils, residuals of perspiration, general outdoor smut, and food debris - are lifted from the fibers and flushed away. Do the clothes get clean? No. The fabric is cleaner, but not completely clean. You may question this until you leave a load of wash IN the washing machine for a week and then open the door. Something is either growing in there, or it grew and then died.
Then there are the choices of water temperature, cold wash warm rinse, hot wash cold rinse, and so on. How do I know? And then this choice “heavy duty” or regular. I usually select heavy duty because it sounds better. Permanent press wash option? F*ck that!
Weird stuff happens to clothing during the twin acts of washing and drying. Specifically, clothing gets turned inside-out, and this is a source of major irritation for me. My slightly arthritic hands struggle with the ridiculously easy task of reversing the inside-out situation.
Maybe this happens in the dryer, the female of this pair. The dryer soothes the clothes and removes the moisture from the traumatized fabrics with softly heated air. She does practice some tough-love tumbling, but it is more like a gentle massage, rhythmic in nature, and mesmerizing in a mechanical manner. This mostly happens only to T-shirts and underwear.
I wear cheap underwear, knit “boxer briefs”, if you must know. Though today’s fashion fanatics in the cities consider Champion brand sweatshirts to infer a certain social status, Ms. Jann and I agree, Champion was what we wore because they are inexpensive, and they achieve the objective. The briefs are sold in a bundle, so selecting one color is impossible. But, turning back to the inside-out problem, after the dryer has finished administering therapeutic treatment, it is time to finish the process. Articles are removed from the warm embrace of the dryer and separated by type. Clothing apartheid happens again. Underwear here, jeans there, long sleeve T-shirts folded this way, short sleeve that way. And this is where the problems are exposed. Some of the damn underwear has turned inside-out, and must be turned inside-in. This takes time, and it’s at this point that I wonder if it is really necessary to perform this rectification; can I wear my underwear inside-out? Will it matter? Who will know? If some horrible accident injures me, I cannot fathom the people in the ER refusing to save my life because my underwear is on inside-out. Imagine, after my Levis are cut off…
“We can save this one! Get me two C-C’s of epinephrine, STAT!”
“No, Larry, this guy’s beyond hope. His panties are inside-out. We have to call it, Time Of Death, 11:23AM.”
T-shirts are the other articles of clothing afflicted with the problem of inside-out. And they are a pain in the arthritis to make whole. At LEAST three moves are required; sleeve one, reach through and pull outside-out. Sleeve two, repeat. Body part, repeat. It’s exhausting.
One time as I walked with Mark Rousseau from the Richmond High teacher’s parking lot, he noticed that my T-shirt was on backwards. This was not some cheap Champion shirt, this was a Carhart T-shirt. Mark dragged me into the Multimedia Lab so I could right the wrong, without exposing my bare torso to students and others who would consider that sexual harassment.
One possible solution to the inside-out problem, whether it happens in the washer or the dryer, is to use a mesh bag for the undies and a separate one for the T-shirts. So I’m back to separating laundry I guess. History repeats itself.
Some of us were hesitant about being seen with you in public before reading this. JK Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow (not in public). Bring more laughs.