I hate doing laundry. Not the actual doing of the laundry, just all of the peripheral things that are involved when you have to use a communal laundry room. The weird social interactions.

Is that the dude whose laundry I just put in the basket so I could use the washer? Is he going to be pissed off? Could I take him in a fight if it came to that? Do his sartorial choices give any clue if he’s prone to violence? Is that even his basket?

I especially hate getting hit on in the laundry room. Not just because it’s invariably girls. I’m wearing the schlubbiest clothes I own because they’re all I have left clean, I haven’t shaved or bathed or brushed my hair today because I have to dedicate the entire day to doing laundry if I’m going to get it done, and you’re hitting on me? Really? So much for the metrosexual ideal. And meanwhile, you’re sitting there tying up an entire washer to launder your underwear, all three threads of it.

Another thing, why do I never get around to doing the towels? Why, at the end of the day, do I think about making one more trip just to do the towels and always end up saying to myself, “Self, fuck the towels?” So I end up with this perpetual pile of towels in the corner of my bathroom, sitting there accusingly when guests come over, shouting that we’re lazy, nasty, dirty dirty people.

It might have something to do with the fact that we have about four dozen towels, none of them matching, all given to us by people who had just bought cute new $30-$50 matching sets of bath linens. This is just another side effect of being the least trendy people in our circle of acquaintances. You might expect me to make some comment on the disposability of nearly everything in our whacked consumer culture, but I’m not. I just think it’s cool to get free towels. I do wish I had someplace to hide the pile, though.