Monday, September 24, 2007

Wash Day Nightmares

On crisp autumn wash days like today, I am overcome by nostalgia for high school homecoming dances after the big game. Especially when I’m doing the laundry on a sunny afternoon and I’d rather be outside.

I’ll never forget my senior year at Holy Christ Academy, when our home team Dialectical Materialists beat the team from Saint Lumpen Proletariat – the team from the school on the other side of the metaphorical tracks, where – let’s just say they valued diversity a bit more than the home team.

Thinking about the actual education I soaked up between games and dances in high school, it occurs to me much was wasted. Take high school home economics, for example. Alas, I may never use my skills to whip up a tuna casserole with crushed potato chips on top; or to make a toilet seat protector out of dumpster trash; or to survive a robot uprising,

In the noble-but-Sisyphusian task of making my whites whiter AND my brights brighter, I observed just now that Shout Out doesn’t make a sound as it silently attacks the juice stain on my t-shirt. Why didn’t I learn at HCA not to juice a pomegranate without an apron on? How cool would it be if, when you dabbed on the Clorox pen, the stain on the clothes would shout, in a tiny echoing voice, “NNNnnooooooooo…”?

Back in those days, we all figured by now robots would be doing the wash, and we’d be riding jetpacks to the grocery store. All the same, I take cold comfort upon finding complementary personal hand wipes near the my grocery store’s cart corral where the jet-pack recharge station should have been. NNNnnoooooooo…