What I’m Reading
Aug
22
A Day In The Life
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You know how babies look really cute so that when they cry you don’t get mad at them, you just want to comfort them and make everything okay? I imagine relationships to be the same way. Yes, love and attraction evolved so that we can perpetuate the human race and all that, but I firmly believe that it also developed so that you don’t take your true love by the shoulders and shake them senseless after walking past the same sink full of dishes and overflowing trash day after day.
Now, I’m not even necessarily talking about the Christopher, although he has on occasion done those very things. I know for a fact the same to be true of my own father, relatives, and friends. And it’s quite possible that those genetics that prevent Chris from turning off a light switch when he leaves the room are too deeply-rooted and innate to ever overcome. Still, I try.
The problem, then, lies in the fact that as hard as I try I cannot understand how the male mind works. Believe me, I have plumbed the depths and come back empty-handed. We are just too different. Here is an example:
There is a giant pile of clean laundry to fold. I dump the laundry on the bed and start folding, separating things into piles according to the person the garment belongs to and where those garments go. When I am done, I put said garments away in the proper place and continue on to the next mundane task at hand.
Then there’s this:
There is a giant pile of laundry to fold. Chris looks at the laundry pile and suddenly remembers he forgot his pre-lunch mid-afternoon checking of email. While reading the internet he suddenly becomes hungry and makes himself a snack, but since there’s so much laundry to fold he doesn’t bother with putting anything away or washing those dishes because there’s just TOO MUCH TO DO. He heads back to the laundry, contemplates it a bit, and then starts a rhetorical discussion with me as to why we create so much laundry for ourselves. Also, he needs some tunes to work by so he fiddles around with his computer until he finds the perfect sock-folding accompaniment. He picks out his socks from the pile and notices one missing and flies into seek and destroy mode. The sock is likely in the next load of laundry coming out of the dryer but that is not good enough, he must find it. Once he has come down off Red Alert he starts in on how we should have a better “system” for doing laundry, by which he means “next time, please make sure all my socks are together in the same load of laundry because otherwise I will go insane and I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME”. Then he halfheartedly folds some underw– oh shit! He forgot his pre-lunch, post-snack, mid-afternoon email check! An hour and a half later after he has eaten and used the bathroom and gone for a run and taken a shower he sits down at his desk to start designing a robot that will fold laundry and possibly also bring him beers while he sits on the couch. When he realizes I won’t let him go to Home Depot to acquire all the requisite robot parts until he has folded the laundry he starts pulling out some t-shirts to unwrinkle. I stop in to grab something from the bedroom and take pity, pausing to help fold. Thirty seconds later, the laundry is folded in neat piles ready to go to their respective homes. I leave, satisfied with my good-natured help. Fast forward to bed time, when I enter the room and the clothes are still in their neat piles all over the bed. I sigh, put my piles away, and resign myself to an extra 45 minutes added to his bedtime routine so that he can pontificate about how the towels are stored too high up in the closet, he doesn’t like to keep the dishtowels above the refrigerator because it’s dusty, he can’t find his swimsuit, we need more shelving space, and OH MY GOD ANOTHER SOCK IS MISSING.
And maybe only half of that is exaggeration.
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24 Responses to “A Day In The Life”
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I completely disagree with that first sentence. Crying babies. Ugh.
Thank goodness JG and I do laundry separately. I am the laundry slacker around here, though.
Actually, I think you totally understand the male mind. You get exactly how it works.
Frustrated today are we?
We havent folded laundry in months…its all half folded sprawled all over the spare room…I dont think I have opened my closet in over a year? Forget Dave EVER folding, I would have to re-fold it all anyways…
I agree, but only because I am Chris and you are my husband. Our washer and dryer are in the basement and until I run out of something, those machines are forgotten. That pile of laundry? Could sit there for weeks until I have eventually used every single peice of the pile.
I’m not gross, right?
The clear answer is let him build the robot. Then you won’t have to worry about it either, and you can watch the GIANT TV into the wee hours of the morning while robots build their resentments against you, and thus against humanity.
DUH!
HAHAHAHA. . . oh dear.
No one in my house puts laundry away. We just wander out to the laundry room and fish around until we find something to wear. Seriously, we had two full baskets of clean clothes in there the other day.
Then – one got put away after I had a complete meltdown over the pile of wet towels left in the utility sink by someone who was not me after a sink overflow caused by a stray sock that fell in because we leave our clothes in the laundry room.
I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Slackers all of you!!!!! I hate when laundry is all clean and dry and left to wrinkle in a basket. I fold as soon as the dryer buzzer goes off and they are put away before I go to bed. I do make Garry put away his own clothes. Drawers & closets thats what they are for. The horror…….
I just pull my clean clothes out of the dryer when I need them. Ah, the joys of living alone.
LOL. I know can see what you mean.
Unfortunately, I think they have figured us out because what usually happens is me saying ‘oh hell, I’ll do it!!!’
Neither one of us does laundry. We send it out (it’s cheap and we don’t own a washer/dryer). It comes back folded but we still can’t be bothered to put it away, so we live out of the laundry bags. Lazy much?
I think I just remembered why I stayed with Birmingham all those years. Because he was all, “as long as there might be a single dirty dish in this house, I will not rest. Even if it means that I’m twenty minutes late picking you up, dammit, I will finish cleaning this stove.” Oh yeah, that last part may have something to do with the breakup…
So I know it’s not just my guy that carries on this way. Do me a favor? If he ever gets that robot created? Let me know. We’ll take two.
Are we married to the same man?
The other night J didn’t run the dishwasher and I woke up to a sink full of dirty dishes AND a dishwasher packed full of dirty dishes. When I asked him why he didn’t run the dishwasher overnight, he said, “You were still eating dinner when I wanted to run it.”
I think here, the tactic is to confuse me with things that don’t make sense until I resort to hugging my legs and rocking in a corner of the living room while I chant to myself and can no longer bother him about the dishes.
ok, so besides the fact that you just reminded me that i have absolutely NO time to do my laundry this weekend… i think you are, actually, psychic. and chris would probably like if you got out of his head. even though the rest of it love it. haha.
I always wonder about these things on the off chance I ever get married or ever have a boyfriend again (seriously, at this point I’d just like to make out with Aaron Peirsol and call it a day) because I’ve lived on my own for so long, I wonder if this kind of stuff will bother me. Or if I’ll just end up doing it all because I’m used to it and have no robot.
But PLEASE, for all that is good and holy, let him invent that robot!
Um. I think I might be a guy. I did laundry two nights ago and they’re still sitting in my laundry basket. And that’s not counting the clean clothes I pulled out of the laundry basket the last time I did laundry and that are still on my bed. Then there’s the shirts hanging from my shower rod. And also, somehow there’s a book floating around on my bed as well. I don’t mind folding clothes, I just hate putting them away.
It’s probably a good thing I’m single, huh?
See, this is why I’m not entirely sure men and women were ever meant to live together. I’m all for the “let’s live on separate sides of a duplex” plan.
(Yes, I have been single a while. Why do you ask??)
And the next time I hear a dude bitch about how he doesn’t understand women, I’m going to throw this right back in his face. Preach on, sister.
OMG! I was ROLLING on the floor with this one! NPW, I gotta tell you, I have a VERY similar post on draft mode in my blog! I swear, it is something about the male species that I just DON’T get!
Ah, the male mind. It is an enigma not unlike the Sphinx.
Sorry about the laundry troubles, but really, can you blame him for wanting to build a robot that does his laundry AND brings him beer? Because that is a million-dollar idea, and if you had a million dollars you could hire someone to fold laundry for you. Or just make the robot do it.
This is precisely why I feel joy about living alone for a year or two before AS and I cohabitate! I figure that if I get a bit of time to do things the way I think is best, I’ll be more willing to compromise when the time comes. (Right? RIGHT?!?!)
My ex would remove his pants as soon as he got home, and leave them lying about, with other pieces of clothing that he had choosen to discard. He’d also kick off his shoes (without untying them, of course, because that just takes too damn long) and leave them lying around in unexpected places, causing me to trip over them daily. Damn, I miss that guy.