This past week, we've had almost every surface of our house covered in laundry. Not dirty laundry as you may have expected from the title, but clean laundry. Since I'm the one in this house who knows where the washing machine is situated (yes, he once asked me where to find it when he wanted to do his laundry for the first time in ages - an incident he seriously, vehemently, and defensively denies ever took place), I'm the one who usually separates the whites from the colours, the towels from the bedsheets, and the machine-wash from the hand-wash before shoving them into the machine. If Shane's around, he pulls the clothes out of the machine and hangs them up to dry but I say, why bother? He gets it wrong anyway. Exactly the same way as he gets the loading and unloading of the dishwasher wrong.
The one task that we do complete together is the folding of said laundry - a task we both loathe with every fiber of our beings. There have been times when we've seriously considered one of the following three options:
- Allot an area of our house to dump our clean laundry in and live day-to-day by just pulling things out of that pile.
- Buy new clothes every time we run out of clean ones.
- Never wash our clothes, ever. The odor we shall emanate as a result will be other people's problem.
As you can imagine, Shane was the one who came up with all three of those ingenious ideas and I was the one who had to shut them down with:
- That area is called the closet and we already have one of those.
- If you'd started pooping money, I'm sure you would have noticed?
- Would Sire be interested in a sexless marriage?
My strategy when it comes to dealing with tasks I loathe is to get them done and out of the way as soon as possible so that I don't have to spend a few hours or even minutes dreading them. I'm not much of a procrastinator, you see.
Shane, on the other hand, is the father of procrastination and I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that as a student living by himself, he has gone for days just surviving on a loaf of bread, water from the tap, and cheap leftover alcohol because he was too lazy to get out of his apartment and buy groceries. Yeah, meditate on that for a moment, will you?
And because we only fold laundry together, I have been nagging him every day for the past week to get it over with. With each passing day, new items got added to the pile and with each reminder from my side, he came up with some excuse or the other to procrastinate. Initially, I resorted to the tried and tested strategy of leaving the heavier items on his side of the bed but he just shoved them to my side and climbed in without a second thought. On particularly frustrating occasions, he'd either sleep on them or kick them on to the floor. This one time, because we had run out of enough surfaces in our bedroom and closet to deposit our clean laundry, we had to resort to leaving them on our spare couch. Funnily enough, The Bromance arrived at our place just minutes later and I had to find a new place for them, all the while muttering to myself that I cannot go on living like this.
The other frustrating bit about folding laundry with him is that the whole process is dreadfully slow. He insists upon segregating the clothes first and folding later although I have made really good points in the past about the effectiveness of segregating as you go. And once the folding begins, you guys remember his demonstrations and magic tricks, don't you?
By now, like I've shared before, I just wait it out. I wait while he pretends to fold something with immense concentration, only to crumble it up and throw it into the air. His demonstrations of his "special folding techniques" fail to even elicit a response from me anymore. Or so I thought.
Usually, when we go about this chore, he folds his clothes and I fold mine for our mutual sanity. However, there's one item of clothing that I simply cannot fold properly and he excels at folding - hoodies. So I leave a pile of my hoodies for him to fold each time and he does them perfectly without any complaint. I think he might even secretly enjoy being good at something I'm not #justsaying
But yesterday, just as he was about to start folding my hoodies, he turned to me in all seriousness and said, "Okay I'm going to show you how to fold these hoodies so that I don't have to do them each time".
Truthfully, I was a bit taken aback by this but I asked him to go ahead and demonstrate anyway.
I stood there watching as he explained how you have to first fold one sleeve in, then the next, then crumble it all together and throw it into the air.
"See that landing? That's a perfectly folded hoodie for you, madam."
The number of times I have fallen for this despite being convinced that it had gotten too old is embarrassing. My entire life is a joke.