You never really appreciate your socks, individually, until you have to hang all of them up to dry in your tiny three-room apartment because someone broke the dryer (air was blowing, but drum not spinning) and didn't leave a note on it and before you figured it out you had done two big wet loads of laundry and it was 10:30 p.m. with no laundromats open. I had to find some thin rope and string it wherever I could (from roller-shade bracket to closet rod, for example) to make clotheslines. My bedroom looks like a tenement, with two criss-crossing lines of hankerchiefs, underwear, and socks. I stuck a broomstick between two kitchen chairs and hung everything I could put onto a clotheshanger from it (a lot of stuff that had been hanging up in my closet is now in a big pile) and set up a big fan to blow onto it.

One other wonderful feature of my building's (coin-op) laundry machine is that the washer doesn't spin the clothes dry; you can literally squeeze water out of the clothes when the load is done. So this morning I still have sopping-wet sweaters lying on paper bags on the floor and stiff wet jeans hanging off of chair backs. It's frickin' ridiculous. I should just lug everything to the laundromat after work but that almost seems like a defeat. Sickly, I paid for two dryer-loads before I figured out the stupid thing wasn't actually spinning, so I feel like I've paid for these clothes to be dry already. So get dry, dammit! This shit is insane!