Laundry

My husband was shocked when he learned that, for my birthday, I wanted, not to go on a nature hike, but to have help folding the laundry.  He rejected that request, stating that, while he will never help me with the laundry, he will pay for a wash and fold service. I did not consider that a useful offer.

I may be neurotic, but I hate sending my personal stuff out to wash and fold places.  I don’t trust them to do a good job cleaning the laundry; I don’t trust them not to lose things; I end up having to refold things that don’t fit my cupboards; and everything is unsorted, so I spend almost as long just sorting, as I would sorting and folding.  Overall, the stress and work associated with the wash and fold is almost as bad as doing the laundry myself.

My reluctance to fold expands exponentially when, as today, I have huge piles of clean laundry that need folding.  (In my defense, I seldom have huge piles of dirty laundry.)  The kids cleaned out their closets last week, which was a good thing, but we discovered that both had been using the back of the closets (and, when it came to my son, the area under his bed) as auxiliary laundry baskets.  We also had a passel of mildewed towels, since I can’t seem to convince anyone in this house that wet towels, if left in crumpled heaps on the floor, will indeed smell.

There is a point to my little laundry screed:  it’s impacted my blogging today.  Even when I wasn’t folding, I felt as if I ought to be folding, and therefore couldn’t reward myself for not folding by blogging.  Such is the complicated psychology of a neurotic, procrastinating blogger.

I realized that my tendency towards procrastination is affecting my blogging in another, more subtle way, too.  I’ve always been someone whose forte is working to deadline.  I’m the gal you can call the day before a major project is due, and I’ll just slam it out and have something for you.  Not all people can do that.  I, on the other hand, thrive on the adrenalin rush.

Right now, as the years of the Obama administration stretch out ahead of us, I’m not feeling an adrenalin rush.  In the days, weeks and months leading to the election, I always felt as if I was working on deadline.  To me, each post mattered because it might, just might, make a difference on that Tuesday in November.

Now, though, I’m not working towards a specific deadline.  Instead, every day just sees me watching a slow-mo train wreck in action.  I can’t do anything to stop it, and I don’t have an imminent election looming.  The latter would flog me to blogging, since I’d either try to stop the wreck, or work towards an efficient clean-up.  Sitting and watching is not conducive to adrenalin soaked writing.

I’ll renew my offer to all of you to shoot stuff my way.  I’m so delighted to have different perspectives and styles here.  I won’t, of course, publish something that’s completely antithetical to my way of thinking or values, but I’d love to publish something that goes beyond what I do, think or know.