Well, yes, these Sox, naturally. (We shall refrain from discussing how silly it is to call the championship games of a sport that is played in very few other countries, the "World Series." We shall merely applaud and feel simultaneously smug and grateful that they won it again.)
But what I really wanted to talk about was socks. And dryers.
I have decided that doing the laundry is sort of like making a weekly sacrifice to a pagan household deity. You bring down a heaping load of textiles to the basement, and offer it, in turn, to a sloshing, churning creature, and then a gasping, hot-aired monster. In the end, you get most of it back . . . except for a sock.
Seriously. My dryer exacts a high toll, because I think I lose one sock every time I do laundry. Oh well, you say. One sock. But have you ever noticed: the Dryer only ever takes one sock of a pair? (I suppose this kind of makes sense, since after you've lost the one, there is very little reason that the other one, freshly cleaned, would ever get dirty again.) And it's always from a pair of socks you like the best.
I buy these boring pairs of "just to get by" socks--a couple of each pair. It would be okay to lose one of those, because I still have a few more pairs that are exactly the same, and if, for example, one sock ends up getting holes in it, I'd have a spare. But oh no. The Dryer only takes one sock from a one-of-a-kind pair--the pair with the stripes or flowers or obsolete London double-decker buses. (That's actually a pair I gave my sister-in-law--but if her dryer's anything like mine, she's probably missing one.) Or, you know, a sock from the pair that is exactly the right shade of . . . something . . . to match exactly this outfit that I have.
Sigh. Sock puppets, anyone?
Good thing I have boots.
6 comments:
Love this! Your humor always makes me smile in appreciation. I especially love that you can turn the most ordinary of things into a moment where we all nod our heads and go, "Yes, yes, YES! I totally experience that, too, and come to think of it, it IS annoying!"
I was walking the grocery store aisles this morning when I found myself in front of the portion of the cereal aisle where you can buy those little boxes of cereal, like Apple Jacks and Pops and Fruit Loops, like the kind you would take on a camping trip or get in a hotel breakfast line. I hadn't seen those small boxes of cereals in the grocery store in YEARS (I don't shop the cereal aisle much), and it took me back to when I was a kid and always wanted my mom to buy those but she never did.
I thought to myself, "Hm. There's a blog post in these small boxes of cereal." But then I thought, "Who cares? Not life-changing or universe-altering."
Only to come home and find that you have blogged splendidly about socks and the laundry deities. Well done, friend.
I wonder sometimes if socks dissapear because we allow them to remain in our wardrobe longer than most other clothing items. Like arguile socks. Why do I still have them? I wish they would go away behind a dryer somewhere.
my family calls the sock eater=the sock monster. it always tends to cause socks to disappear. probably also due to disorder and not knowing where everything is!!!!!!!
I'm laughing inside as I am in my Very Quiet Office right now, but oh I'm laughing. Especially because I did laundry this Monday-Tuesday, and was pondering this exact same issue. I've always figured there was a Dryer God who exacted a toll on my clothing. But over here, I don't use a dryer. So when one sock went missing this week, I was highly perplexed - my washer has never stolen one before! But maybe there was a more minor washer deity that only sporadically took a toll of lesser-valued exercise socks... But then I found the sock the next morning when I went to hang up some more laundry. The drying racks do not exact the same toll, thankfully, and I have retained the majority of my socks upon moving overseas. I'd recommend such a move, if I were you. There's a single bedroom in a two bedroom flat opening up sometime in the early spring... (hint, hint)
oh, and I had always figured the socks were somewhere, just waiting for me to move the dryer and rediscover them... But then I helped my sister move from her house, and we moved and packed up the washer and dryer and painted the floor where they'd been, and there was never a sock to be found. I was a bit spooked out by this, as I'd lost many a sock to her dryer...
Christianne--once when I was a kid, my mom recommended I read the sort of memoiry books about being a country vet in England, by James Herriot. As part of her plug, she said, "He's so great at taking every day situations and writing about them so that they're interesting and usually really funny." I'm not entirely sure that sticking one's arm up the inside of a cow is really every day experience for most people, but you know. Anyway, I thought, "I want to be able to do that!" So if I succeed on occasion, this is a very delightful thought to me. In any event, you should blog about cereal. Definitely.
Marty--are you saying the Dryer is actually doing us a kindness by getting rid of the stuff that's long since gone out of style?
Scott--it's true, I AM disorganised. But I really think the Dryer is a large part of it in this case.
Mariam--you know, as I was writing that post I thought, "This did not happen in England. I did not have a dryer." Then I thought about hanging everything up all over the house like I used to. I have a lot more room here to do that. But the wrong kind of radiator.
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