Friday night laundry party

My girlfriend ("A.") had laser eye surgery yesterday, so we're taking it easy tonight. While she's passed out in a Demerol haze it's a good opportunity for me to do some laundry, which I need for a wedding tomorrow anyway.

We're lucky enough to have washers and driers in the building's basement so it's really no big deal (of course I still put it off all week). But… have you done laundry on a Friday night before? Is there a more humiliating experience? I might as well write on my forehead "I have nothing better to do on a Friday night. Got change for a dollar?"

As if this isn't bad enough, while putting my clothes in the drier I ran into two of the resident middle-aged, single, eccentric women in my building. "Cambridge types." There are four of them out of sixteen units, the equivalent of an entire floor, so the odds were good I'd have to participate in an awkward conversation while shaking out my underwear. Cursed odds!

The second run-in was with the flighty one who alternately acts like we've never met and we're best buds. I asked her how she was doing and she said she was tired, before adding "Couple that with what's going on in New Orleans and it's been quite a tough week." Um, what?

Let's say there's a "tough week" scale from zero to one thousand. I'd put fatigue squarely at one and the ongoing tragedy in the south at one thousand. Add those together and you get one thousand one. It's a large number, sure, though your struggles aren't really contributing to it. On the bright side, you just climbed my loathing scale with a bullet. One thousand!