Laundry

So, I’m not the most diligent blogger ever, sue me.

The upshot of having only 40 items of clothing in your entire wardrobe is that it makes packing for a trip pretty easy. A down side, if one can call it that, is if you don’t stay on top of the laundry situation, you can find yourself in dire straits.

When dressing I have and continue to re-wear items of clothing I have worn before laundering them—sometimes I wear things multiple times. It’s actually pretty easy for me to do this. I mean, the mental process isn’t that complicated. I briefly inspect for wrinkles and stains and then I half-heartedly fake-smell the article and then I put it on. I don’t actually go through the charade of fake-smelling; I'm making that up. My sense of smell is almost non-existent. I mean, I can’t really smell anything. Most things (and by most things, I mean, everything) smell no differently than a glass of water to me. Sometimes I hope to get picked to participate in some smell-related research experiment so I can totally jack up their results. Scientists! So complacent!

I’m not sure why I have a diminished sense of smell. I think it’s genetic. I googled “poor olfactory sense” and two items popped up about psychopaths and poor olfactory sense. And when it comes to being a potential psychopath, I already have one strike against me.

I am convinced that my mortality is higher than the average person with a better sense of smell. According to one webpage, I’m more likely to die or suffer serious harm from “fires, poisonous fumes, leaking gas, and spoiled foods” because I can't smell. I always have a brief moment of concern when I eat yogurt. Incidentally, my son recently started talking about "airport smell", that the airport has a particular smell to it. I think it’s like “new car smell” but weirder. He may be right. Smells like a glass of water to me. I’ve also had an ongoing phobia that I have terrible body odor that I myself cannot detect and everyone else in the world is too polite to tell me. Don’t you judge me; I was born this way. The bad sense of smell thing, not the B.O. thing. I smell like a rose.

This is where the Laundry Fairy does some of her best work!

Wow. I did not see that digression coming. What was I talking about?

To totally over think it—as I did with my underwear and socks—clean laundry is a luxury. Approximately 100% of the time when I lament that I don’t have “anything” to wear because “everything” is dirty, I actually have at least several other articles of clothing that I could, in fact, wear. This also has a lot to do with issues of gratitude and appearance, but let’s not get sidetracked here. This same lament also completely ignores the fact that in my garage I have these magical contraptions that wash and clean my clothes. And my magic machines are pretty fancy. Like one step down from flying the Star Ship Enterprise. And let’s not neglect the fact that in my household a good bit of my laundry gets washed and folded for me. That issue is for another time, but let’s face it, my wife does a lot of things for me that I regularly take for granted, God forgive me.

Laundry is thought of as the quintessential chore. A necessity and burden. I won’t bore with explanations about how doing the laundry has really been. I run out of clean clothes a lot faster. I have to do laundry more often. Sometimes I only have the option of one pair of clean socks. Sometimes I’ve needed to re-wear items. And when I’ve done laundry this Lent, I pretty much am confined to the house because 38 out of 40 items of my clothes are in the wash.

As I’ve already begun to explore, our clothes mean a lot to us and our appearance communicates a lot to ourselves and especially to others. Never mind a crisp suit or freshly polished shoes, or skinny jeans that were stitched by French nuns and aged in a Czech beer cellar and endorsed by Derek Zoolander. What about simple clean clothes? At the basic level, they might not convey a great deal, but what about the people for whom laundry is a real challenge...

This is how we roll. We're not proud. Or ashamed.

In my mind, clean clothes cost nothing to me, really. I do acknowledge that there is a cost to doing laundry. It’s just that I can’t be too bothered to think about it all that much. But how can I otherwise calculate the cost? My reflections haven’t been terribly deep. However inconvenient it is to do laundry for me, there are folks for whom it is a great concern the likes of which are entirely inconceivable to me.

I wish I had something more thoughtful to say about this other than to suggest that I am pondering how I might incorporate practices of mindfulness with regard to my clothing. And that might be good. I also tried to consider what Jesus or scripture might tell us about washing our clothes. But at the risk of venturing too much into a purely intellectual exercise, I'll instead plug The Laundry Project and the Laundry Love ministry that the Christian community Thad's is doing in Venice, CA (mad props to my friend Jimmy Bartz) as thoughtful endeavors that might help any of us practice mindfulness about our clothes and laundry.