I will turn that dryer on as high as it goes because I can.

The other day Mr. E and I were standing in the laundromat growing increasingly irritable over the obvious suck of time and money involved in getting our clothes only marginally clean, when he looked over at me, read my mind, and said "let's buy a washer and dryer". I told him if he found one, and figured out how to pay for it, and got it into the house, I would totally do all his laundry, forever. Which sounds crazy, but really, actually, I love to laundry. LOVE IT. A washing machine is like crack cocaine to an anal retentive cleaner such as myself. And without one, I was not fulfilling my true anal retentive destiny. Anyway, we totally couldn't actually afford it, but that's what credit cards are for. And besides, I bargained them into delivering it for free, so at least I can tell myself we got a good deal, even though I am sure we didn't, as we are naive babies when it comes to the world of bargaining for used household appliances. Which, hello? Algebra class? Could I not have learning some useful skills during that time? Like maybe how to walk in really high heels or how to bargain for washing machines? Yeah, thanks for wasting thousands of hours of my life on Tuesday mornings from 8:15 am to 9 am, algebra, you bastard.

Here's someone who said it much better than I ever could...
For some reason this poem always reminds me of my mom.
Who also loves to do laundry, and has tons of awesome rules about it that we used to get in these huge fights about. And now I can break them with my own washing machine! Awesome.


SORTING LAUNDRY
Folding clothes,
I think of folding youinto my life.
Our king sized sheets
like table cloths for the banquets of giants,
pillow cases, despite so many washings
seams still holding our dreams.
Towels patterned orange and green,
flowered pink and lavender,
gaudy, bought on sale,reserved,
we said, for the beach,
refusing, even after years,
to bleach into respectability.
So many shirts and skirts and pants
recycling week after week, head over heels
recapitulating themselves.
All those wrinkles to be smoothed, or else
ignored, they're in style.
Myriad uncoupled socks
which went paired into the foamlike those creatures in the ark.
And what's shrunkis tough to discard
even for Goodwill.
In pockets, surprises: forgotten matches,
lost screws clinking on enamel;
paper clips, whatever they held
between shiny jaws, now dissolved or clogging the drain;
well washed dollars, legal tender for all debts public and private,
intact despite agitation;
and, gleaming in the maelstrom,
one bright dime,
broken necklace of good gold
you brought from Kuwait,
the strangely tailored shirt left by a former lover...
If you were to leave me,
if I were to fold only my own clothes,
the convexes and concaves
of my blouses, panties, stockings, bras
turned upon themselves,
a mountain of unsorted wash
could not fillthe empty side of the bed.
-Elisavietta Ritchie