Talk Thursday: How To Avoid Doing Laundry

You know, sometimes I get tired. (Imagine. Six and a half hours of sleep on an average night and sometimes she gets tired.) Seriously, I haul myself up to the keyboard every morning--well, most mornings--and I try to at least churn out a paragraph or two of whatever the fuck I'm working on--and don't ask me what that is, it changes frequently. I also try to crank out at least one query letter, if only to prove to Scaley and Fang that all their freaking out at the drop of a hat, or a sock, has been so much wasted energy and I have no intention of giving up. Then I get up, go to work, and ponder on the drive there why I'm trying to impress cartoon dinosaurs and whether or not I should give up.

Look, I'm not going into a full-on whine here, but this isn't easy, what I'm doing. Try it sometime and you'll see. It's kind of like looking for a job when you're unemployed, with the added bonus that it won't pay anything. Well, not for a long time, anyway. I have to admit that so far everybody's been very nice. I keep waiting for that reply that says quit wasting my time, you illiterate moron, but it hasn't shown up yet. Instead they typically say, I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass on this project, but thank you for thinking of me, which, I guess, is supposed to make me feel better. Um, it doesn't. Just in case you were wondering.

Anyway, when query letters get old, there's always laundry. Today's Talk Thursday topic is about laundry, which is pretty funny if you know the division of labor in our household. It's very simple: I do laundry, Joan does grocery shopping. Reason: I cannot stand grocery shopping. When Joan had a hysterectomy and couldn't leave the house for six weeks, we almost starved to death (or maybe cholesteraled ourselves to death; there were a lot of pizzas ordered) because I didn't want to do grocery shopping. I finally dragged myself to the grocery store that we referred to as the Dysfunctional Ralph's, where I promptly had a meltdown in the pasta aisle because there were too many different kinds of rotini. Seriously, there were about 47 different kinds. Who needs that many different kinds of rotini? The manager had to come over and talk to me. It was a little embarrassing.

By contrast, laundry: Sort, wash, dry, fold, put away. Simple. I'd much rather do laundry than grocery shopping. So the best way to avoid doing laundry is to marry me, but unfortunately you're too late there. I'm a wild'n'crazy kinda gal, but a polygamist I'm not.

Technically speaking, I should be throwing in a load of laundry every night after work, so that when the weekend rolls around, there's only sheets and towels to take care of. In real life it rarely goes that well. Half the time I'm lucky to remember to clean the cat boxes (which are in the laundry room), never mind do the laundry. I guess you could say I'm avoiding the laundry, but at least in part I'm shying away from baby-sitting the washing machine. Its automatic balancer went on the fritz about a year ago, and ever since then it sometimes gets off balance during the spin cycle and goes whappita whappita whappita at top volume until somebody runs downstairs and fixes it. This is supremely annoying, especially when all you have to do to balance the silly thing is like move a sock or something about three inches. Eesh.

When it's sunny out, and not too cold, I like to hang sheets outside. Joan says it makes them smell like sunshine. It also saves dryer electricity. I'm not kidding, when I started hanging laundry outside our summer electric bill dropped by about half. Not only are you saving the electricity that runs the dryer, you're also saving the air conditioner from having to cool the house back down after the dryer's been running. Plus, I think hanging clothes outside annoys my idiot neighbor. Added side bonus. (Says the Buddhist.)

So that doesn't really tell you anything at all about avoiding laundry. It does, however, tell you how to avoid query letters. Laundry, after all, has to be done at certain times. (Emergency panty loads come to mind.) Query letters, on the other hand, can be put off indefinitely. Or at least until you start feeling guilty about not writing them, which for me never takes very long.