With the GME situation on hold for the weekend and an uninspiring slate of college basketball games on Sunday, I thought this was the perfect time to write about my personal struggle with laundry. My wife is the breadwinner in our house and I am the laundryman. That’s fine. I’m not above doing the laundry. In fact, I rather like it. That sounded British. Anytime you use ‘rather’ in a sentence, it sounds British and thus, nicer. For example, if you want someone to stop talking and you say, “I’d rather you shut the hell up,” it sounds so much nicer than just saying, “Shut the hell up.”
Anyway, I rather like doing the laundry. Along with the dishes, I like tasks that have a specific start and end time. With investing, gambling or writing, there’s always something more to be done. You have to rebalance your portfolio or edit the edits to your story. With the laundry, you start a load, put it in the drier, fold the clothes and you’re done. And not only are you done, you feel a great sense of accomplishment because you can proudly yell up from the basement, “Hey honey, I just finished the laundry!” And though your wife and child will totally ignore you because they don’t view completion of the laundry as an Olympic level event, the entire project only takes around an hour and the results are reliably satisfying.
The problem I’m having with the laundry is connected to my Type A-ness. Much like a sink full of dirty dishes, I can’t stand it when there’s a pile of dirty clothes in the basement that needs to be washed. More importantly, and this is really the main point of this piece, I absolutely have to fold the laundry after it’s out of the drier.
You see, my wife and daughter were mysteriously dropped onto planet earth from a distant galaxy where they lived on planet NoFold. The inhabitants of planet NoFold claim to not care if their clothes are folded or not folded.
“Why would I fold my clothes?” my alien daughter asked me the other day. “I’m just going to throw them in my drawer where they’re going to get messed up anyway. What’s the point?”
“Totally agree,” her alien mother chimed in. “Total waste of time to fold clothes.”
As you can tell, I have given a great deal of thought to this situation. It’s important to figure this out because folding clothes takes a good deal of time. First, you have to separate the underwear from the skinny jeans, which is not as easy as it sounds. Then you have to inside out the pants and shirts that the alien life forms didn’t inside out before placing them in the hamper. Finally, you have to, you know, fold the laundry.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was a kid, I used to smoke a lot weed, listen to A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-1, De La Soul, Erik B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, Special Ed and MC Lyte and I didn’t give two fucks about the laundry. Now I’m 50 and I can’t stop folding.
Yesterday, I took my daughter’s clothes out of the drier and began angrily throwing them into the laundry bin to bring then up to her room unfolded. And then I remembered those classic DirecTV spots when you end up in a roadside ditch. And the spot played out in my head.
When your father doesn’t fold your clothes, your life becomes unruly
When your life becomes unruly, you don’t get good grades
When you don’t get good grades, you join a band and get pregnant
When you join a band and get pregnant, you don’t get a record deal
When you don’t get a record deal, you move back in with your parents
When you move back in with your parents, someone has to do the laundry.
Needless to say, I folded the clothes.
