Tag Archives: laundry

Dirty laundry

Most of my socks have holes in them. Every time I need a pair of socks, I have to go through this giant pile, they all look identical, and I have to try to match a sock that’s equal to another sock. It’s my own fault, I’ve dug myself a pretty nice sock hole here. Every time I go to Costco, I buy another pair of socks. Right out of the package, these socks are great, the elastic is really snug, the fabric firm. But after a month or two months of use, they get a little thin.

sckhle

And so my problem is more than just socks with holes. My problem is that I’ve been buying new socks every month for the past two years or so, without ever having gotten rid of any of the old socks. I’ve got a huge pile of socks, all with varying degrees of wear and tear. When I’m trying to find a pair of socks, I’m laying them all out, and again, they all look exactly the same, so I’m trying to feel a seven-month sock against a five-month sock, and then after going through twelve or thirteen potential pairs, I finally get a good three-month to three-month match, but then I put them on and the left one has a premature hole, and so I’ve got to throw it out and start from scratch.

All of my pants smell really bad. I’m six four and I have a thin waist, so buying pants isn’t the easiest. Every time I go to a clothing store, I always try on a pair of jeans. On the rare chance that there’s a decent waist-to-length combination that actually makes it all the way down to my feet, I’ll always buy them right there.

But I can never put them in the dryer. Clothes shrink, jeans especially, and I’ve learned the hard way that the only way to ensure that right-from-the-store fit is to make sure that they never go in the dryer. So how do I get them dry? I have to hang them up in the basement. And for most of the year it’s not a problem. I take them out of the wash, hang them up, and then a day later they’re dry.

But it’s been so wet lately, so rainy and humid and gross. I’ve been trying to wash my pants for weeks, but every time I leave them to dry, I come downstairs the next day and they’re still kind of wet. And then I come down a day later and, maybe they’re a little dryer, but they’re still kind of damp. After day three, I need a new pair of pants, and even through they’re not super dry, they’re dry enough, and so I just put them on.

And then I notice that smell. It smells like an old basement. It’s that smell that you get when you put a load of laundry in but you forget to move it to the dryer. So I keep it there in the washing machine for like four or five days, and then later that week I’m out of underwear, so I really need to do another load, but that first load is still sitting there in the dark, wet washing machine. I don’t have any time to run it through again, and so I just throw it in the dryer, whatever, I tell myself, maybe the heat will somehow make things cleaner.

But it never does, it’s gross, that smell is worse than just regular basement. It’s regular wet dirty basement, and maybe I’m in a rush and I’m late for work and so I take a shower and I’m running even later than I thought, and so I don’t have any time, I just grab something to wear, anything, and then when I’m finally out of the house, I finally make it to the subway, it hits me, what’s that smell? It’s me. I stink. I smell like gross dirty laundry that’s been sitting in a wet, dark corner of the basement for a better part of a week. And there wasn’t enough time to match a pair of socks, and so one foot feels great, just really bundled up in that brand new sock feeling, but other one might as well be going commando, there’s a hole at the tip, my big toe can’t stop moving around in there, squirming, trying to fit itself through the hole. And did that guy standing next to me move because he can smell the laundry smell? Is it really that noticeable? Am I really that unpleasant to be around? Of course I am. I wish I could walk to the other end of the subway, but it would just follow me, because it is me. It’s me. These clothes smell horrible. My socks are the worst.

That’s the worst

I’m so cold. It just got out cold this week and I’m not used to it. I can’t get warm. The heat hasn’t kicked in yet. I hate it when you complain to somebody about how cold it is and they just say something like, “Put on a sweater.” That’s the worst. Just listen to me complain. Or join in with me. There’s always more to complain about. It’s like when you’re really hungry and somebody just goes, “Have an apple.” Just shut up dude, maybe I just want something to whine about for a little bit. You eat an apple.

I think there’s going to be a lot of snow this winter. Snow is always fun for the first day or so, but you can only throw snowballs at cars for so long before eventually your gloves get wet and your hands start freezing. And then your socks get wet too. And then you go out to throw snowballs the next day but all the snow is slushy and brown. I hate it when it’s raining or gross out and somebody says, “I just love rainy days.” Bullshit. Nobody loves rainy days. I like to storm around the house on rainy days and try to make everyone feel as miserable as I am. What are you supposed to do all day? Read? Get out of here. I’m going to get in the car and see if I can’t splash any pedestrians with gross puddle water.

The worst is when you forget to move your laundry from the washer to the dryer. And then when you finally remember, it’s too late to rewash everything, but it’s also too late to not do anything, and so you have to run those nasty clothes through the dryer, because you need a shirt and you’re already late for work. And then the rest of the day that smell is just following you around, like feet, like an old wet towel.

That’s another thing I can’t stand, when you’re taking a shower and you go to dry off and you’ve been using the same towel for one day too many, and it’s the same botched laundry smell, and what are you supposed to do, stand there and air dry? It’s freezing out. So you grab the towel and dry off and now you smell disgusting. But it’s over already, the whole shower is ruined, the whole day is ruined. What are my options? Take another shower? My skin’s going to fall off. That’s the worst, when you take too many showers and your skin gets all dry. And maybe I don’t have any clean towels. Or maybe they’re all the way in the dryer, but it’s another load of bad laundry, but I don’t realize it yet because I already smell terrible from the first shower that I took and I think that the smell is just me, but it’s really this second towel, and that’s the worst, like even worse, the absolute worst, because the second shower is too much, my skin’s peeling, and I get out and dry off with what I think is a fresh towel, but it’s just as gross. Why does all of my stuff smell so bad?

Or what’s terrible is when you make a pot of coffee but then you go to the fridge to get the milk but there’s only like half an inch of milk left. I don’t feel like going out to the store. I need coffee just to get out of the house, not the other way around. And so I try to ration. But I always find that whenever there’s just a tiny bit left, it always comes out weird, like some of it doesn’t blend with the coffee, it’s just these little hardened dots of milk, and I try to enjoy the coffee but there’s not enough milk, it’s way too bitter.

Or when I’m trying to watch TV on the Internet and they keep showing me the same commercial over and over again, every commercial break it’s the same lame ad, so lame that they won’t even run it on regular TV, only on the Internet, because they’re thinking, hey, this tool is too cheap to buy cable, so we’re only going to show him ads for cheap garbage that maybe he can afford, and the production value is so cheap, with the worst actors, and they put it on repeat, like they’re thinking this guy is so incredibly cheap, maybe we’ll be lucky if we can trick him into buying just one cheap product, so we’re really going to just inundate this guy with this one ad, until it’s all that he can think about, until he’s not even enjoying his show anymore, every four minutes, commercial time.

Or when your phone vibrates in your pocket and you get excited, maybe it’s an email, maybe it’s of those jobs you applied to, maybe it’s one of your friends with news about some plans this weekend or something fun going on, but you open your phone and it’s a voicemail. Nobody leaves voicemails. And you have to wait for your phone to call the voicemail, and you put the phone to your ear and it’s nothing, but it keeps going, two minutes of nothing. And then you have to listen to the options to delete the message. Why won’t the cell phone company just shut off my voicemail like I asked them to?

And then the wall starts hissing, like way too loud, and you go to check what the noise is but it’s the heat, finally kicking in, but it’s been a whole season since the heat’s been on so you forget, and you touch the pipe and it’s way too hot and you get burned. And then you tell somebody about what happen and they’re all like, “Get some ointment.” Seriously, why don’t you just be quiet and listen for a minute, just let me vent without being such a know-it-all. You get some ointment, you condescending jerk.