Today was my first time using a laundromat

September 8, 2018
Brooklyn, New York

Today was the first cool day after a warm, moist summer. I feel like most things are more attainable when there isn’t moisture hanging in the air. Every person I’ve seen today has talked to me about the weather, which I find charming. I used to think talking about the weather was lame but now I like it because it’s such a simple way to feel a brief connection to another person, even if it’s just the cashier at Duane Reade.

Our old landlord gave us a key to the laundry room of the building across the street. It worked fine for 17 months, but Tuesday night I tried to do laundry and the door was jammed shut. We have a new building owner (is there a difference between a building owner and a landlord, or does one just sound a bit kinder?) . I doubt they have the new key to the other building’s laundry room.

Every day at 8 am a construction crew comes to remodel roughly half of the units in our building. The new building owner is renovating and will probably raise rent because they’re making an older building seem very fancy. I don’t mind the construction during the week, because I get up at 7:15, but I do mind being woken up at 8 on a Saturday morning by a jackhammer. Since I woke up super early today I went down the street to a laundromat. I hadn’t done laundry in 3+ weeks and a few days ago, I washed a shirt and a pair of socks in the bathroom sink. Today was my first time using a laundromat. A side effect of spending 90 percent of my life in the suburban south is that I have a very limited idea of how laundromats work because everywhere I’ve ever lived has laundry in-unit.

I spent $9 on two loads of laundry which I guess isn’t too bad. I was really worried to leave my stuff in the dryer but I walked home to take clothes that would shrink in the dryer back to my room. No one touched my stuff. The walk is four minutes and eleven seconds, the exact length of the song “Answer: Love Myself” by the Kpop group BTS. I’ve been listening to Kpop for one whole week now, and the childlike joy it brings me is enough to displace how embarrassed I feel to have an interest like this in my early twenties. Also, when does early twenties become mid-twenties? 24? The laundromat was clean and new, and my clothes seemed cleaner than when I used the sad basement laundry room across the street. I liked sitting across from the washer and watching my clothes spin around.

My to-do list for today was pretty long, but nothing was urgent. I took out the trash and cleaned the kitchen because we have fruit flies (again). I went to the bodega and bought a seltzer and bag of chips. I finished two books that had been dragging on: ‘I Am Having So Much Fun Here without You’ by Courtney Maum and ‘Give People Money’ by Annie Lowrey. The former sucked because it was about a man who cheated on his wife, did a shitty and selfish job of showing her he was sorry, then after 300 pages of learning to hate this guy, his wife takes him back, and the book ends. The latter sucked because it explained the concept of a Universal Basic Income as a “radical” idea to change the world, then rambled a lot about how people hate the concept of UBIs and how it won’t actually change much fundamentally, it’s more of a halfway measure/band aid solution. What’s the point, then?

I hung a shelf. I had to tap a nail into the wall to make a little hole, then I used a screwdriver to shove in a thick, short screw. I’ll have to putty the wall and paint it when I move out, but I like the shelf. It’s light wood and pale pink and it has a bunch of candles and some receipts and a crystal my mom gave me on it right now. I’m not sure what else to put on it. All of the surfaces in my room (dresser and desk and bedside table) are covered with things and it stresses me out but I can’t get rid of any of the things, because I use them all. I bought the shelf to help with that, but now I don’t really want to put anything on it other than pretty things (I will eventually get rid of the receipts).

An Indian restaurant in my neighborhood left a flyer on our door that encouraged people to place their order over the phone, so I called to order chicken Tikka Masala instead of using seamless. I often feel guilty using a website to order delivery because it doesn’t feel human to press a button and have food arrive. I try to only order delivery on weekend nights and the night before I travel, but I ordered a lot of pad thai this summer anyway because I didn’t have the energy to cook.

My friend Alice stopped by my apartment while she was out for a jog. She lives one neighborhood over and we usually see each other at a bar that’s equidistant from us, or at my apartment while she’s jogging. A few days ago, I realized mid-conversation with a coworker that a lot of my sentences start with “it’s hard because” or “I was thinking about that earlier” and I’m trying to not preface everything I say like that, but I feel myself qualifying every sentence I say to Alice. She and I talked about a birthday party a mutual friend was having that night in the East Village.

She decided to go, and so did I. There were 16 bottles of rosé at the party, and someone brought drink markers that were little men in speedos. We all sipped rosé in a plastic cups with a little men dangling off the side. I took a cab home instead of the subway, which felt luxurious, and fell asleep wearing a silk eye mask and my dress from that evening.