Areas of Unrest

13 September 1999 - Washday Monday

QOTD: "In an American school if you ask for the salt in good French, you get an A. In France, you get the salt." - B. F. Skinner

Reading: William Westervelt, Hawaiian Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods

Listening to: Loop Guru, Amrita

There are very few things more pleasurable than clean clothes. One of the most wondrous places in the world is just outside the municipal campsite in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. There, in a corner otherwise notable for people trying to sell you wooden elephants, illicit drugs or black market currency, is the first machine laundry one sees in weeks on the African overland circuit. It's horribly expensive by local standards, but the 100 Zimbabwean dollars (about $7 U.S., or a buck or two more than a bed in a good hostel would cost) I spent there was one of the best values I've ever gotten for my money in terms of sheer enjoyment.

But, alas, this season of my life finds me not as a mud-bespattered traveler but as a far more prosaic working women in need of clean underwear. And there may be some drop and collect laundry on the Westside of Los Angeles, but I certainly don't know where one is and it would feel horribly extravagant when I can do it myself for a mere $1 a load to wash and 75 cents a load to dry. Nor do I even need quarters any more as my building has installed smart card readers. Which actually creates a budget problem for my compulsively precise mind, as I usually put $20 on the card at a time and I could record that as money spent on laundry if only the card were not also usable at the coke machine. (I try to avoid the coke machine as it is overpriced, but there are times when I need a cold caffeine fix and succumb to the lure of a bottle of Dr. Pepper. The coke machine is also the only place where you can add money to the card.)

Still, laundry is a chore that I always find tedious and resist doing until absolutely necessary. In this case, there were a few clean pairs of underwear, but no clean white shirts. And at least one clean white shirt is a necessity for a meeting on Wednesday which I need to fly out for tomorrow. Now, there are two approaches that I take to laundry. I can either do just what I absolutely have to, which means picking through both whites and colors to find what I need most, and doing one mixed load. Or I can bite the bullet and do it all, which means three loads - white, colors and "modern fabrics." I believe that the "modern fabrics" category is unique to my family. The terminology is definitely my mother's and it refers to all of the stuff that you're really supposed to wash by hand because everyone knows that synthetics melt if you don't but you're too lazy to wash it by hand so you wash it in the machine in cold water and nothing ever seems to melt but you've learned that this doesn't work for wool which you really do have to take to the dry cleaners or it ends up horribly disfigured. The point is that I'm far too lazy to wash things by hand unless I really really have to. So this hand painted shirt that I bought at a township crafts project outside Cape Town gets washed by hand. Pantyhose get washed by hand. Silk blouses get washed by hand for about a year until I decide they're old enough to risk the machine and nothing dreadful ever happens to them in it.

In previous places that I've lived, I more often did the survival sort of laundry. But those places had just one or two machines so you had to do your washing in serial. My current place has. amongst its other yuppie amenities, two laundry rooms with 6 washers and 6 driers each. This enables parallel processing so it's less painful to do it all at once. And, unlike my mother, I understand that one of the awful things about doing laundry is sorting it, so I have three hampers and sort things as I take them off. (You cannot believe what a difference in my life this makes. I am perfectly serious. I used to go out and buy new underwear instead of doing laundry because I hated sorting clothes so intensely. Which reminds me of an entirely unrelated story. Robert had an uncle who wore new socks every day. He went to Klein's once a week, bought 7 pairs of socks and discarded each pair after wearing. I think Robert told me this in an attempt to prove he was relatively normal compared to the rest of his family.)

There's also good exercise lurking in the need to do laundry. Neither of those laundry rooms is particularly close to my apartment. In particular, there are 5 fire doors between my apartment and the nearer laundry room. I can choose the aerobic route of running back and forth to my apartment with one hamper at a time. Or I can go for strength and agility by trying to maneuver all three hampers to the laundry room in one go. Actually, there is always a strength element because I have the world's heaviest towels. This is by choice. They're lush, thick Egyptian cotton bought at outrageous price as a treat several years ago. They are wonderful - but they weigh at least four times what normal towels weigh. The pathetic viscose rectangle I brought to the laundry in Vic Falls weighs about a hundredth what one of my bath sheets weighs. This is the price one pays for luxury.

Of course, there is usually another dash back to the apartment because half the time I forget the detergent and/or the smart card or both. There's also a bit of a mental debate about whether or not to lock the apartment door while I am in the laundry room. It only takes about 2 minutes per trip (I did the aerobic version today and the digital displays on the three machines came out two minutes apart). But a burglar could probably clean out everything of value in one minute. Usually, I decide to just use the lower lock and leave the deadbolt undone. Surprisingly, given how much I agonize over other trivia, I don't obsess too much on this issue.

The drier presents another problem. Namely, I cannot quite decide which circle of hell people who don't clean out the lint trap should be condemned to. I want them to be chained in a dungeon full of lint but Dante didn't seem to devise any such place. I have to admit that I also can't understand why someone wouldn't clean the lint trap in the drier. I actually like the feel of lint. I've heard that you can use it to make pulp for paper making and I would try that if I weren't convinced that somebody would see me gathering up drier lint and taking it to my apartment and refuse to believe my explanation. At any rate, I find that I usually have to clean out someone else's drier lint, but I am still a good citizen and clean my own too.

Which reminds me to mention the real wonderfulness of Kruger National Park in South Africa. Oh, sure you can see lions and rhinos and elephants and zebra and waterbuck and wildebeest and umptyump impala. But you can only see those during the day, unless you pay for a night game drive and you're only likely to do that one night. Okay, hyenas and jackals do come up to the fences around the campgrounds but they aren't the least bit cute. (I have never ever met anybody who actually liked a hyena. Which is surprising given what animals some people do like, but that is a subject for another rant.) And, sure you can spend a pleasant evening sipping amarula and chatting under a gloriously star-filled sky. But you can get drunk anywhere and the night skies are better in Namibia. Amongst the great places in the world to see wildlife, it is only at Kruger National Park that you can spend your evening at a campground that has machine operated washers and driers! Even at Vic Falls, they hang your clothing to dry in the sun and you know that as environmentally sound as that may be, the clothes are never as soft as machine dried ones. And driers are immune to the risk of rain. Besides, it's just 4 rand to wash and 2 to dry, and even if you have to run the drier an extra cycle, that's still pretty cheap. (It was about 5 rand to the dollar at the time.)

The problem is that after all is said and done, I have to schlep three hampers full of clean clothes and the world's heaviest towels back to the apartment and put them all away. Stuff that hangs up is easy. Towels are very easy. T-shirts and underwear are moderately easy. But at the end of the day I need to match up socks. Oh, I know I should just go and get some of those thingamajigs that clip a pair of socks together - I had a discussion about that at work with somebody just a few weeks ago and he claimed that his discovery of sock thingagmajigs was as much of an epiphany as my discovery of the multiple hamper technique. Still, I resist. The labor to figure out which of the 12 different kinds of black socks go with which is my penance for not having to boil tubs of hot water and rub things on a washboard and know just what bluing is. It's the chapters on laundry that are the most horrifying in those books about the history of housework, with it being a chore that really did take up all of every Monday. Even the effort to cook with a wood stove pales in comparison. Of course, the standards have gotten stricter in response to the relative ease of washing clothes nowadays. Those women beating your clothes against the rocks at the laundry ghats in India, your clothes getting ever thinner in the process, do a good job, but one doesn't expect whiter than white.

It isn't even the sorting of socks (and my realization that the driers have a decided fondness for black socks, which are three times as likely to get eaten as the nerdy white socks are) that is the worst aspect of doing laundry though. The true horror sinks in as I realize that I did all of this labor before changing the sheets. And before eating dinner during which I get tomato sauce on the dress I was wearing. All too soon I must engage again, pursuing the enzymatic removal of particulate matter from a fiber matrix in a high phosphate environment (as a lecturer the summer I spent at a biochemistry program phrased it).

Which brings me to my final laundry story. That summer was the one time I can actually remember doing laundry being pleasant. Steve, who I had a mild (and entirely unrequited) crush on, and I used to walk into town once a week to do our laundry together. It was quite practical as he was an obsessive tennis player who almost always wore white which I rarely did, so my bras would get thrown in with his tennis shorts and his one or two colored t-shirts would mix in with my jeans. We'd start the wash and then go next door for lunch. (I seem to think it was a Friendly's, but it might have just been a local diner. For those not in the know, Friendly's is an East Coast chain of family restaurants, known primarily for their ice cream sundaes. At least that's what they were known for when I was in high school.) In the middle of our tunafish sandwiches (okay, my tunafish sandwich; Steve was from Boston and ate tuna instead) and chocolate sundaes, one of us would go back and move things to the drier. We'd finish lunch, fold our clothes and walk back to the school. All quite companionable and surprisingly pleasant, with the added bonus of clean clothes to show for it.

There we have the real solution to washday blues. All I need is a tennis player and a Friendly meal.