In Which a Usually Domestically Tidy Person Decides Henceforth to Be a Slob

"I believe you should live each day as if it is your last, which is why I don't have any clean laundry, because, come on, who wants to wash clothes on the last day of their life?"

--Unknown

I did laundry on Monday.

One could be forgiven for thinking that this was a fairly basic process. It shouldn't be that much of an unusual experience to wash clothes in England rather than America--the instructions on the dryer are even in the same language!

However, things never work out quite like that. As it turns out, the laundrette close to my dorm is closed for renovation, so we have been instructed to take our laundry to Lewes Court, which is all the way across campus. So step one: transport LOTS of laundry across campus. Then there's the problem of paying for laundry. It costs two pounds a load to wash, and then a pound per half hour in the dryer. The dryer doesn't get very hot, though, so you need a minimum of two cycles to get things dry enough to take back. Each load of laundry thus ends up costing about four or five pounds. That sounds a little high but not terrible until you take into account the conversion rate--four pounds equals $6.26 and five equals $7.82. I had to do at least three loads. So step two: pay around twenty bucks to do laundry.

Also, the laundrette (which services the entire campus) is only open Monday-Saturday 10:00-5:30, which leads to step three: stake out at the laundrette and wait for there to be an empty washer. Repeat twice more.

Really.

So, I handwashed my clothes in my dorm's "laundry room" (I put it in quotation marks because all the "laundry room" contains is a large sink and an ironing board. No iron, no soap, no drying rack, no clothespins, no washer/dryer, no laundry baskets. Sink. Board). Almost all of my clothes were dirty--after all, I'd traveled in some of them, and been to lots of outdoor, hands-on day trips in the others, so there were lots of dirty knees and shirt smudges--and it took about two hours to wash them all. It was difficult. For one thing, the sink has no stopper, so I made do with a piece of plastic wrap. For another, wringing out a lot of denim will do terrible things to your hands, like rubbing the skin off your thumb knuckle.

But I did finish, and I brought all my damp clothes back to my room. Then realized that they had to all go somewhere to dry.

Six pairs of jeans.

Twenty-four pairs of underwear.

Twenty-six socks.

Nine tank tops.

Two towels.

Washcloth.

Hand towel.

Three dishcloths.

Thirteen shirts.

This is not a large room. It's not tiny, but it is a single. It's much smaller than my dorm room last year.

Socks were hanging over the radiator like some fractured fairytale version of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. Underwear and additional socks were hanging from the rungs at the bottom of my chair and the hot water pipes on the wall. Every cabinet door was open with a shirt or towel draped over it. One chair held three shirts, the my computer chair carried one. I rolled out my suitcase, propped it open, pulled out the handle, and spread tank tops over it. My jeans hung upside-down from the curtain rod like a really bizarre kind of garland. I used the four hangers I own to hang things from the top of the wardrobe, the top of the bookshelf, the top of my door.

And then NOTHING DRIED QUICKLY.

Well, that's perhaps being a bit misleading. The heat is on, so anything on the radiator dried in a couple of hours--I kept rotating articles of clothing off and on as soon as they dried. But you may notice that it's currently Wednesday afternoon. I just put my clothes all away and restored my room to how it's supposed to be. There are still two pairs of jeans on my bed because the waistbands are ever-so-slightly damp, and one t-shirt which was in a cold corner and is still a bit damp-feeling around the hem, but that's not so much. But for the past 48 hours it's been like a humid jungle of wet cloth in here, and I have not enjoyed it one bit. It makes me very much miss the laundry room in Virginia (that's my dorm last year at Elon, not the state), back when I used pay about $1.75 to wash and dry my laundry at 11:00 on Friday or Saturday nights and was able to skip down the stairs to check on it whenever I wanted. And then I got to haul it upstairs and dump it in my lap and take my time folding the clothes because they were all nice and warm and cozy. And then often I'd go get a cookie and coffee from Acorn with Kate (which cost about the same as buying a single Snickers bar here). Sigh. You know it's bad when you're getting nostalgic for your college's laundry facilities.

(This is me writing a paper in daylight at the end of the year when the room was a bit messy, not me doing laundry with my bed made and the lamps on, but still, this is totally where I sat and sorted clothes out. See the books in the background? See the quilts hanging off the end of the bed? See the fan? See the beautiful Chik-Fil-A lemonade cup? Ah. 3VA, I miss you.)

Anyway, the moral of this story is: I'm going to live in dirty clothes and not do laundry again until December.

Ok, maybe not that drastic. But I am going to wear everything I have multiple times so that I only have to do laundry once or twice more.

You can get five wearings out of a pair of jeans, right? No?

But I'm a college student.

Yes, I most certainly can.

PS--I took no pictures of this because I figured nobody would really want to see my underwear draped over the radiator. It was colorful, but slightly odd. You are welcome.