Culturally speaking....

Last night my roommates and I got in a bit of a "discussion" over the laundry.

I'd been lazy and left my wash in the machine, and as it was nearing bed time (aka 9 pm last night as I was trying to shake a summer cold) I told Michelle I'd just throw it in the dryer when she walked out with the basket of wet clothes.

"The DRYER?" she asked me, as if the concept was completely foreign to her.

"Um, yeah," I responded. "Why wouldn't I put all my clothes in the dryer?"

Well, this set the two of them off in a tizzy. They'd never dried their clothes before, never wanted to risk ruining them. Their mothers only did laundry on good days, and hung up the wash on a clothesline in their backyard. You get used to clothes being stiff for the first 30 seconds when you put them on. And no, their fathers didn't seem to mind any sort of lacy bits hanging out on display.

I'm sorry, did I just step back to the 1950s?

We have a dryer in the apartment. It works wonderfully. It takes all of about 2 seconds to throw my load of clothes in instead of the 20 minutes it takes me to drape each item over the "clothes horse" in the living room. I do get the point about retaining quality longer and about risking potential shrinkage by hand drying, but I also like knowing that in an hour or less I can have dry clothes, as opposed to 2-3 days depending on the weather outside.

We concluded it must be purely cultural- so while I will happily convert back when I'm home, for now I've been shamed into slowly hanging out my clothes (and hoping their boyfriends don't peek at my undies).



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