ezola

This is a different girl than episode one.

This one lives right next to the laundry room and today is doing laundry at the same time as I am. She’s in her late twenties, wiry, doesn’t speak english. I come down with some dirty clothes, her wet clothes are still in the washing machine. I consider whether to knock on her door, move her clothes to the dryer, or put them on top of the dryer. I decide on the second option and then put a load the washing machine.

45 minutes later I come down and her clothes are finished, and I want to move my clothes over. Faced with another set of socially charged options: pile the clothes on the table, fold the clothes on the table, wait, or knock on her door. I knock on her door and ask her to deal with her laundry, which is she happy to do. She’s very friendly but speaks french with a thick quebec accent, so I can’t communicate with her beyond the basics.

She piles her clothes into a basket, smiles at me, thanks me for something I don’t understand (perhaps for alerting her that her clothes were done), and returns to her room. I start moving my clothes from the washing machine to the dryer and find

a pair of her undies.

Cute undies. Hello Kitty undies. When I moved her clothes from the washer to the dryer, I missed a pair of her undies. Now what do I do. Options:

a. Knock on her door and give them to her. If I do this, I run the risk of her thinking that I’m hoarding her underwear and trying to generate a pseudosexually charged situation by knocking on her door with them in my hand. It’s weird. I can’t do it.

b. Leave them in the laundry room. Unlike anonymous clothes that are often found in washing machines, we both know that I know that these are her clothes, and also that I know which door is hers. I can’t leave them in the laundry room.

c. Toss them. This felt like a very good option, except that I would be throwing away her perfectly good clothing.

What would you have done?

And then the right answer came to me:

d. Dry them. When they’re dry, I can knock on her door and give them to her pretending that *she* was the one who left them in the machine.

I’m so proud of myself.

We wealthy residents of wealthy nations are lucky to have all our basic needs taken care of for us. The problem space theory, however, predicts that we feel the same anguish burden as children in Sudan who are eating rocks for breakfast. Very simply, the problem space theory states that humans have a finite, fixed space in their consciousness for problems. If you have big problems, (malnourished Sudanese children, for example) you shrink the problems to fit inside the space; if you have trivial problems (anyone reading this), you enlarge them to fill the space.

My biggest problem at the moment is Made In China stickers. Like most things made in China, they seem adequate in the showroom, but once you get them home, they fuck you. I just bought a desk lamp that has not one but two Made In China stickers. When I discovered the second sticker (hidden inside the lampshade), I almost returned the thing.

Instead, I have developed a specialized heating, lubricating and peeling apparatus so that after breaking four fingernails you don’t have to reach for power tools that destroy the item the sticker was affixed to. In this way, the HLP Made In China Sticker Remover will pay for itself in no time. Get one while supplies last.