Laundry

The holidays really messed up my laundry schedule this past week.
The laundromat insisted on closing New Year’s day. See? they do not care about me!Thanks to their selfishness I had to wait another whole day–with 2 more sets of dirty clothes to wash added.

I didn’t do anything on that day.Anyone sensible gets their freak on the night before and wakes up around four pm with an over driving desire to do that laundry…that embarrassing pile stacked at the foot of one’s bed and by stacked I mean you have just enough foot room to navigate from bed to door.

Did you have New Year’s eve sex? No? Yes? Me neither. I was in the hut,
banished from possibly cursing my boyfriends spear and making him liable to miss that vital shot at dinner…if I touched it when I had my period.Trust me, there is no spear touching going on when I have my dot. I guess we all have our hang ups and a ban on sex when the little lady is having “women’s troubles” is my b.f’s.

So yesterday was my chance to haul all eighty pounds of our combined clothes(most of it comprised of my man’s socks) to The Wash Cycle 340 Myrtle ave.

A pre-laundry haul scavenger hunt turned up a tidy stack of quarters which cut down on the expenditure of actual folding money thereby enabling me to purchase some seventy nine cent bags of Lender’s bagels.
I haven’t been so poor since I lived alone in Manhattan desperately clinging to my $1,110 a month apartment!
And while I expect some money to come in any day now, it hasn’t come yet and I need it.My one good bottle of wine policy is being flouted.I have 2 mediocre bottles.One of the caliber of deli wine and the other brought to me from Israel, which in Israel costs about 7 dollars but here in NYC costs around 27 if you can find it…so I am sort of saving it. *authors note: I drank it.
All anyone needs in order to enjoy some good old fashioned manual labor is 3 hours of sleep and cramps.It’s great.
My laundromat is not fancy.You do not have to purchase their little plastic card,then go through a twenty minute tutorial on how to put money on the card then guess how to use their machines,then go put more money on the card…you get the idea.
I live in the ghetto. I can only say this about the proprietors: a never ending supply of quarters(extremely rare, you know) plus hell hot dryers paired with lots and lots colorful folks from my neighbourhood=an awesome adventure! Apparently –on the day when I am absolutely forced to gather up my dirty clothes because I am down to wearing strange outfit combinations around the house because all my lounge wear is soiled– is also the day when 20 (7) member families have decided to take a family picnic…in the laundromat. I know I love to fix a 3 course meal and take my people to the mat in order to really enjoy it.All those tables! So what if they are for folding clean, dry clothes? They make such handy lunch counters.
When I am sort of in pain and haven’t had enough sleep I become alarmingly jovial if not witty.And my wry observations usually take place only inside my head . Last night roommaty thing D. who is as laundry inclined as I am, accompanied me so I was able to pass the grueling hours a little more pleasantly than usual.

Although D was sort of reeling from a marathon of dirty sex and partying(euphemism totally implied here) and the walk up Carlton gave him the cold sweats, we had a fine time listening to the obese woman with a skin condition berate her obese daughter for not noticing when another customer began to remove their clothes from the dryer—

Obviously a man who paid attention to details like numbered dryers and not to the fact that these weren’t his clothes.His terrified reaction to mother’s truculant “wtf are you touching my clothes for?!” , “this is dryer number 4! squeak! My clothes were here…” squeak! They’d been removed earlier and he was tardy.
I did my folding and packing we got the hell out of there.