I hate laundry. I would do nearly anything to avoid doing my laundry. I am not sure where this particular aversion comes from. In years gone by, I never used to hate it like this. In fact, I remember when we came out of the stone age in our household, that old wringer washer finally went away, and we got the new fangled, modern washing machine. It was a big day, very exciting, because for the first time, we could wash clothes without the accompanying danger of losing our limbs to the arm eating wringer.
Now? Well, I hate the whole thing. I hate sorting. I hate moving them from floor to washer. I hate moving them from washer to dryer. And I especially hate moving them from dryer to wherever they belong, which explains why I have laundry baskets sitting on my bedroom floor that are older than the dust bunnies having grandchildren under the glass shelf I keep in the corner to put all my junk on that I can't live without. I am like a college student in a dorm room, living out of my clothes hamper because I'm too lazy to put anything away.
I could, without a doubt, remove 85% of the clothing I own from my closet and never miss it, because I am quite certain that I will never wear most of it again. There are a variety of reasons for this, but mostly, I'm changing, and my clothes aren't.
Some of them are teeny, purchased during my divorce, which is self-evidently the last time I'll be ever on the right side of thin again. I can barely get some of the pants over my thigh, to say nothing of zipping them up. And the skirts and suits are clearly more suited for someone with an anorexic build, not the current over-fed look I am sporting. It's a shame, because some of those outfits are pretty nice, but I should just give it up, because that was another time. And on balance, I'd rather be in the here and now, so I guess that's the trade-off.
Some of them are simply out-dated, rather like their owner, and don't fit the current life I"m leading. I have my wedding dress, for example, hanging in my closet, and I'm feeling caught between a rock and hard place with it. On the one hand, it's a beautiful dress, and would, no doubt, look lovely on some bride that may like it better than a modern offering, especially if the price was right.
On the other hand, I don't feel quite right about allowing someone else to wear a dress that was used for a marriage that was ill to begin with, and fated to fail. Somehow it seems that I would be spreading my own bad luck around, and I can't quite feel good about that. So there it hangs, too good, not to mention expensive, to throw, but no good to me, either.
It is suspended on that hanger like a reproach, reminding me every day that I failed at the single most important thing I ever undertook in my life. If nothing else, it's a great humility inducer, because there is no way to get above myself with that daily reminder, so perhaps it's not a bad thing after all.
I have clothes that I wore in high school, and they fit me still, so I have a hard time getting rid of them, just when I have finally grown into them. My strategy back then, when I was thin by nature, was to buy everything ten sizes too large, and maybe people wouldn't notice that I only weighed 90 pounds. I got tired of the comments and the questions about my weight, which seemed to be the thing that drew people's ire and attention. Now, I fill them out nicely, so it seems a shame to get rid of them just as they finally fit. Although I do a look a little silly in elephant pants, I will admit, and polyester is not really the "in" thing right now.
My dislike of laundry is not exactly a new development. Although I didn't mind it in high school, by college, I had developed a definite distaste for the whole thing. Perhaps it was related to the idea that you were stuck in the dorm for the entire time period to keep watch over your belongings, lest someone else get there before you and remove them to take the appliance for themselves. When that happened, you would find your garments laying around in soggy piles on the dirty folding table, giving everyone an opportunity to notice the holes in your underclothes, which is embarrassment personified. Commitment never was my thing, and committing to laundry was out of the question.
I didn't have that many clothes to begin with, I was poor then, just like now, and so I had to wash my clothes a lot. I would usually wait until I was out of underclothing, using that as my cue that the time had come. One time, I am sorry to say, the time came and went, and I still had not made my way into the laundry room. That year, the washing machine was in a room literally a few steps away, so it was pure laziness at play in the situation, leaving me no excuse at all.
That morning, as it dawned on me that there was not only none of the good stuff left, but even the back-ups were gone, I felt a little desperate. [You ladies in the crowd know what I am talking about when I say back-ups, so you know that when they are gone, you really have gone too far.] I searched through every drawer and nook in my closet, hoping against hope that I had misread the situation, but there was no joy in the sainted world I inhabited, and I was truly up a creek without a clean pair of undies.
Hm. What to do, what to do? While I realize that most people would simply hand wash a pair and get on with their day, I was not as practical then as I am now, and I felt the only answer was obvious. So shortly thereafter, I was on my way to the store to purchase some new ones. I justified it by telling myself I needed new ones anyway, and now the old ones could become the back-ups, and the back-ups could be held in abeyance for such moments as this, so I would never have to face the humiliation of going all the way to the store just to find clean undies for the day.
My roommate, who is still my friend, is still shaking her head over the foolishness of the whole thing, because she never allowed such situations to develop in the first place. She was the early bird in the room, the organized one, the one who always did her homework on time. I was the original flake, of course. Distracted and distracting, it appears, since she just informed me recently that she has problems paying attention, and can't abide noise when she is studying. It's too bad I didn't learn that when we were in college. I just thought she didn't like television. But at least I gave her a few laughs for the troubles.
I still employ the same system to determine when the crucial moment has come to break out the laundry detergent, and it's still not fail safe. So obviously I did not learn the practical life lessons I hope my son is learning in college. Which does not bode well for the future of my basement, I fear, but I digress.
All this laundry talk does make me wonder about something, though. Did you ever consider what Noah's poor wife and daughters-in-law did on that ark for clean undies? I mean, they are surrounded by water, it's true, but if the entire earth was flooded, then surely the water was pretty salty, and then there is the whole flotsam and jetsam problem. I don't know about you, but I certainly wouldn't want to pull out a pair of undies only to encounter scratchy seaweed or a dried snail hiding therein.
I think that would be quite the problem. Of course, if you have spent the last 30 years building an ark on dry land, taking the abuse of your neighbors the entire time, and then don't even have the satisfaction of saying, "I told you so," I suppose the issue of clean undies is less pressing. I dunno.
Speaking of boats, I find something very curious. We keep talking about being in the same boat, we're all in this boat together, we sink or swim together, and so on. Have you ever noticed how many allusions there are to water in the colloquial language? Anyway, here is something I have been pondering some recently.
Say you are building a boat. You build the frame, and then you spend most of your money on the captain's cabin. You put every conceivable convenience in it, and when you are finished, you have very little left to spend on the rest of the boat. So you cut corners on the bottom, because no one sees it anyway. Would you be surprised if that boat sinks? Because I wouldn't. Just ask the third and fourth class passengers in the Titanic how that worked out for them.
Houses are the same way. You can build the most fabulous mansion on earth, the Taj Mahal of houses, but if the foundation is a failure, you will ultimately end up with a pile of sticks and stones with which your neighbors will hurt you, for having been such a lame brain.
Henry Ford was a genius. Not an auto genius, although he may have been that, as well, I don't really know. But he was an economic genius, because he understood, at a fundamental, gut level, that when your own workers can't afford the product they are making, then you cannot succeed. It should have been intuitive, but it seems where the national economy is concerned, we are always approaching it from the other direction. I personally cannot think of a single situation in life where you can float the boat from the top, no matter what kind of shape the bottom is in.
And yet, for the last 25 years, we have been told that the economy should work from the top down. Trickle down economics, Ronald Reagan called it. If the top is healthy, goes the theory, then they will create jobs and provide benefits and the whole kit and caboodle of us will see the positive results. Happy, wealthy people leading the way to riches for us all.
From my vantage point, it hasn't worked that way at all. The more money the wealthiest people in this country have accumulated, the larger the bottom class, and the smaller the middle class. I am not making this up, these are statistical facts, and can easily be found in a few seconds on Google. Whether you agree with me about the reasons, the reality is that the wealthiest people in the country have gotten richer while the lowest 85 percent have gone backwards.
Not unlike a banana republic, I would point out, which is what we are increasingly emulating, what with the voter fraud and the out of control economy and the out of touch leadership telling us what's good for us while we are all shouting about being ready to take our medicine, but I digress.
This country was built on the concept that anyone can move upward economically, and yet, the policies of the last 25 years have promoted exactly the opposite movement, that the movement of money goes from the top down. I say, if you have dry rot at the bottom of the financial pyramid, the whole structure is unsound and doomed to failure.
I rarely wear my political heart on my sleeve, [literally everyone I know seems to be on the other side, and I hate it when people are mad at me, so I just don't talk about it much,] and I have no pretensions to being an economist. But I believe in this case I can see more clearly than the successful people I am close to, and who clearly have made far better choices in their lives, what is obvious to those of us who are bottom dwellers - the national economy doesn't work the same way as a family. What benefits the top tier isn't making it down to the small business owner, to say nothing of the waitress at the local Denny's. Wages are not like giving your kids an allowance; you get a raise, you give them one, too. There is a complete disconnect between those at the top and the people doing the grunt work, and the people on the lower end are becoming increasingly disenfranchised.
I saw this demonstrated in the company where my ex-husband was employed a few years back. When he started there, the entire company was in one large room, with the guy in charge sitting at a desk inside an office that didn't have a door, four steps from where my my ex-'s desk was located. He was not only aware of all the business operations, he was aware of their personal affairs as well. He knew when someone had a sick kid or car problems or when an employee was buying a house. He was connected to the people who worked for him, and because that was so, he was a popular and fair boss.
Over time, the company grew, and eventually, he was in an office that not only had a door, but was on an entirely different floor from the rest of the workers. Only a few people ever made their way into the rarefied air of the upper level of the management, and he was completely sheltered and hidden from the workers at the bottom of the food chain.
I will never forget the moment that I really knew the change had come. We were at the annual Christmas party, an event which he had always enjoyed hosting, and at which he announced every big event that had occurred in the lives of his employees. He would recount the new houses, the marriages and the new babies. He knew when someone had gotten an award or did something special in the community. All these positive things were brought out, so that the employees could revel in everything that they had collectively enjoyed and accomplished in the previous year, and celebrate their successes together.
Then, one year, the boss stood up and started to make his remarks, giving the names of the new employees that had been hired that year, and he said something along the lines of, "I don't know all of these people, and I'm not sure what they do, but we sure are glad that they are on board, and I welcome them to the company." It was a defining moment for me, the moment I knew that the company was forever changed.
His compensation soared after that, while the salaries of the lowest paid workers in the office remained static. The health insurance cost went up while the benefits went down. The intimacy of the early days was replaced with cubicles where each person hid behind an ever movable facade, which occurred every time someone was hired or moved on. Loyalty, which used to go both ways, no longer went in either direction, and people came and went within months, where previously, the turnover was less than one person a year.
I see that as a microcosm for the economy as a whole. The top is so divorced from the bottom that they no longer see each other as real, and thus, it doesn't matter what happens to them. Ultimately, the boat will sink, because the dry rot has caused a huge hole in the floor, and we are taking on water faster than the Titanic. I hope that the Carpathia is closer than it appears, because otherwise, we are about to have a lot more casualties. And speaking as a fourth class passenger, I have tasted the water. It's salty and it's making me sick.
