No, I'm not talking about that. Besides, that's for married people and I think the frequency's weekly, though last week must have upped the ante, what with the holiday and all.
My sister tells me that dogs like routine, but if they do they're not alone. People do, too. Here in America we've grown used to changing the battery in our fire alarms twice a year when Daylight Savings Time comes and goes, we bathe on Saturday night and have roast on Sunday, we change the filters in our heaters monthly and brush two times a day.
We have set routines for all these things and perform them without thinking, which may explain their popularity. Most everyone I know likes being mindless as often as possible, and having a structured routine lets us accomplish mundane tasks without giving them much thought.
It's easy enough to launder my clothes when they get dirty, what with automatic washers and dryers and store-bought detergent, but I feel a little left out of the mainstream. The ads for soaps and things show kids playing, and I can't remember the last time I got grass stains on my knees. They've gone the way of stubbed toes.
Nor do I work in an oil field. I can't recall ever having iodine in the house, but that seems to be a pretty common stain from what I've seen, as is blood. The number of times I've had my clothing ruined by blood is precisely one, but it's much more common than my personal experience would lead you to believe. I understand that.
At some point in my twenties or thirties I realized that I didn't work up as much of a sweat sitting in my office as many people did at their jobs. Not only didn't have stains to remove, I barely soiled my clothes at all. Still, after each day's wear, I washed them so I could safely wear them again.
I still do, usually, but winter brings with it a number of problems. Unlike summer, I routinely change my clothes several times a day now. I wear clothes to bed and leave them on for the first hour or so of waking, coffee-drinking life. During the day I wear one set, and it's sometimes shorts, depending on my activity, but once the sun goes down, I change again into heavier, warmer clothes.
I pull layers on, and remove them, and I'm never sure how much "wear" I've given a particular sweatshirt or pair of jeans. Have I crossed the threshold of acceptable use? It's one thing to wear a pair of jeans all day, but when that's broken up over a couple days for a couple hours each, can I keep wearing them?
I ask, mostly because I'm very much aware that not only do I have to remain on the right side of society, but I don't want to wash my clothes too much. It only took me a few times cleaning out dryer lint before I put two and two together and realized that if I washed my clothes often enough, they'd completely disappear. If they were losing that much fabric each time I washed them, it was only a matter of time before they'd be laundered into non-existence.
Yesterday, in what may be a record for my neighborhood, some kids were out playing with water wearing bathing suits. Incredible. Tomorrow, rain is forecast, and yesterday was hot as a pistol. Some people may point to these changing weather conditions as reasons for illness, but I'm not convinced about that. What I can suggest is you only get to wear a bathing suit once before it needs laundering.
Think of it as underwear, but, sometimes, cuter.
2 comments:
I believe the commercials that advertise a detergent's ability to get out blood stains (usually called "protein stains") are aimed at women who need to get menstrual blood out of panties. They're just never going to show a commercial with a woman who has an accident like that.
I will wear jeans as many as three times before washing again ... but they have to be "light wears" like only for part of the day and of course no grass staining.
Yeah, I understand the surprise menstrual thing and tried to hint at it in my post, but I think it's funnier to picture surgeons or butchers returning home from a tough day at the office. The oilfield workers that I remember, by the way, were in an old commercial for Lava soap.
I'm about the same with jeans. What would be handy is if these scientists got off their collective butts and started making that nano clothing with built in stress timepieces, sort of like stopwatches. Let my clothing, itself, time itself up to the magic eighteen hours!
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