While Doing My Laundry - Emily

Yes, I am randomly sitting in the laundry room in the basement of a dorm 500 feet away from where I’ve started to call home. In this room there are a million washers and driers, there are enough abandoned socks to make a quilt for a family of nineteen, and fans  that are supposed to keep this room fairly manageable.  The fans only keep the room cool enough for us not to fry like an egg on the blacktop. The best part of the laundry room is the people watching.  My favorite people to watch are men because most of the men cannot work these machines. And it is absolutely hilarious to watch them try to figure out where the soap goes. (Hint! Its in the drawer, the one that has a sticker of soap on it).  Today I think I will share some stories about the laundry room.

You can tell when people are, what I like to call, “laundry virgins”.  First off, they have the deer in the headlights look when they walk in the door to meet the 400 washers and driers in this building.  You can see the thoughts shooting through their heads; ‘wait, which one did my mom say to use first?’, ‘how much soap do I use’, ‘I need soap?’, ‘thats a lot of socks’, ‘who do I ask for help?’, and my favorite, ‘she’s a girl, I wonder how much I have to pay her to do my laundry’.  

Then, after they see how much clothing they have, and how much space is in the washer, these thoughts come up; ‘I think these machines are too small’, ‘are these the girl’s machines?’ ‘I think my mom said something about separating’, ‘Maybe I should split this up somehow’, and ‘I wonder how much I can pay her to do this.’ At this time they make one of two choices, cram as much as they can into one washing machine, or separate their laundry.  

What separating laundry is for women, and what separating laundry is for men, are two totally different things. Women usually separate each load by colors, and whether they are delicate or regular. I’ve seen men separate their laundry by sports teams, by tops and bottoms, by first three colors of the rainbow and last three colors, by winter clothes and summer clothes, by clothes they wear under everything and clothes they wear over everything, and favorites and non favorites. There are more thoughts; ‘did I actually wear this?’, ‘god that smells like crap’, ‘that’s not my sock’, ‘thats not my women’s underwear’, and ‘She’d probably do all my laundry for five bucks.’ 

After separating laundry, comes finding where the soap goes. Lets review this.  The soap, the most important part of washing your laundry, goes in the drawer with the sticker of the soap cup on it. The “laundry virgins” look everywhere.  This is very hilarious because if you sit on the bench provided for students who sit and wait for their clothes, the sticker is at eye level. Once these “laundry virgins” open the drawer, their smile quickly fades into a look of sudden terror.  There are three words. Bleach. Detergent. Softener. Fortunately, this information is written on the bottle of soap their mothers secretly packed. Unfortunately, no one actually reads the bottle.  

At this point, the soap is poured in, and there is a stare-down between the washing machine and the man.  While the washing machine is just beginning the spin cycle, the man is afraid he just paid for the wrong machine.  As the man turns around to check that he paid, the washing machine takes its chance to sneakily put soap in and spin a couple of times before the man turns around. The man checks the washer, then the number sticker on his machine, and then checks to see that he paid.  The machine suddenly takes its chance to dramatically spin uncontrollably as the man turns around just in time to freak out because he just managed to do the impossible. He mastered the washing machine. 

The look upon the face of each “laundry virgin” is maybe the funniest look anyone will witness in his or her life. This look of pure self accomplishment is like the look one gets after they are potty trained for the first time, the first time they rode a bike, or like they just bear wrestled a 600 pound bear with one hand tied behind their back. The last few thoughts before the “laundry virgin” pulls his clean clothes out of the conquered washing machine are as follows; ‘Maybe I should wash everything in here, its so easy’, ‘I need a long nap’, ‘next time I’m mailing my clothes home’, ‘pretty sure I just shrunk this shirt’, and ‘I wonder how much I could pay her to do my laundry.”

Emily Again!

I guess I should go into what college life is like. We live in a twelve by twelve cubicle with slanted walls. Most of the room is taken up by our beds and desks, several precious inches are taken by our fridge (with Bri's stale muffin from Tuesday on top), the other space is filled with our lime green beanbag, and our half filled drying rack.  We have a five foot square area where we can sit and attempt to lean and watch our seventeen inch television.  We have one window, which doesn't open, and an air conditioner that is constantly acorn bombed by squirrels. Our walls are thinner than paper, so we can hear EVERYTHING that goes on on the whole floor.

We share a bathroom with at least 25 other girls. This is disgusting. I have seen girls forget their underwear in the shower.  I have seen so many homeless bars of soap skewed around our shower. I have seen so much food,  not ingested, digested, and partially unidentifiable. I have seen a bra so large, you could carry around triplets in it. 

The worst part about our room is that it is in an arch. Our room is above where the drunk students walk under to get back to their dorm room.  We can not only hear everything that goes on, but we can hear every conversation that happens below us. We've had girls cry for their jackets, several people express their love for the Jewish people, and one person racing invisible people back to the building.  Our drunks come in shifts. We have the 12:00 drunks, who are not very loud, we have the 1:00 drunks, who are loud enough to still be considered slightly sober, we have the 2:00 drunks, who are loud enough to wake a hibernating bear, and last but not least, we have our 6:00 AM drunks.  These are my favorite. I  love the 6 AM drunks.

My favorite part of college so far was the lovely tornado drill experience. Not only was I scared shitless, but I was laughing hysterically the whole time. There were a couple 'I don't want to die a virgin' and one 'dude, i just saw a squirrel get fucked up'. It was particularly enjoyable because I am terrified of the dark and thunder storms.  Bri, on the other hand, is terrified of tornadoes. It was an adventure. 

Thats all for now! 

Bri's Side of the Story

So since Emily has now gotten to have her say, I suppose it's my turn. 

I am the Journalism Major of the two of us and I guess thats why we started this blog! I have a boyfriend although I always do. I love him very much, so we have decided that we will try and get through this eight and a half hour divide known as college. He decided I couldn't see other guys, I decided he could see other guys if he wanted...

As Emily mentioned before we are like day and night. I thought she would be the neat one, turns out I was wrong about that one (I can say this because I am currently staring at her plate of five day old mac and cheese remains on the ground by my bed) as I was wrong about a lot of things. Regardless, we are now sisters bonded for life whether we like it or not. She wakes up at 6:30 Mondays and Wednesdays usually scaring the shit out of me, or unsuccessfully trying to wake me up when I ask her too, because well I don't have class till ten or eleven on those days. She sometimes has a sudden bought of uncontrollable gas, and I will often forget to warn her when I walk around our room butt naked. However, we have cried together, laughed together, and even taken care of each other when it was necessary.  I guess I'll let this lead into a story.

Emily and I are both very open people...let me rephrase this...I am a very open person and I am beginning to rub off on Emily.  This is especially true when it comes to our two guy friends who followed us here from high school. One of those boys is our friend Zack. I'm pretty sure our whole hall thinks Zack and Em are dating (their not guys!) because he is over so damn often. He seems to always wonder into our room, even if we haven't gone down to let him into our building, and makes his way to the nice green bean bag we had to have. His activities range from trying to calm Emily down and failing miserably to writing down all 80 of our television stations. I'm not sure if it's because we've both known him for practically our whole lives, or if it's because we've accidentally called him our gay best friend so many times it's starting to stick, but we are very comfortable around Zack. We are in fact so comfortable with him we tend to walk around half naked in his presence. By now he's learned the drill, if one of us is heading towards our drawers or closet he probably needs to hide his face to avoid the tremendous boobage. OOHOOHOOH! Quick tangent, Emily and I both seem to have ginormous tatas and it is both a blessing and a curse. However back to my story. Zack is not the only man who we disregard clothing around, there is also of course our friend Kris. Kris is known around our hall as the gorgeous chocolate man who is friends with Bri. Well one night Kris was chilling with us, and Emily began her nightly routine of pants-less-ness. Which she does every night, usually before running with hands covering her bum to the bathroom. Kris being the gorgeous chocolate man he is, I decided I'd just fling off my shirt too. Well looking back at these stories make me realize that Emily and I really don't like clothes. 

So there you have it, the moral of that story is Emily and I would rather be naked.

Emily's Side Of the Story...

I'd like to start this blog off with a little introduction. My name is Emily. My roommate's name is Bri. It is now week three of us living together. I guess we started this blog because we have all of these crazy funny stories to tell, and no one will listen. 


I should start this off saying that Bri has a boyfriend, and I am single. I am a relatively private person, and Bri is more open. My sheets are spotted and crazy, and hers are Egyptian cotton 500 thread count. I think, she acts. I moan in my sleep, she snores (though she will not admit it). I'm transparent, she's always a nice bronze color. I like chicken, she likes steak. Etc. 


As much as we are different, we are the same. We both love the same television shows. We love the smoothies they sell on campus. We are both up right now trying to do homework. (She is succeeding, I am epically failing). But most importantly we both are crazy. 


Lets start with a story...


Once upon a time, Bri as well as our hall mates and I went to dinner. It was a nice relaxing dinner after spending about ten minutes waiting in line to get into the dining hall, ten minutes deciding what to eat and waiting in a line for the food, about fifteen minutes trying to find a table, another five minutes trying to find a table that seats five, and then two minutes attempting to fit everyone at this four person table. After we finished stuffing our faces with our delicious plastic food, we decided to grab dessert. Two of us grabbed ice cream, two grabbed inside out cookies (chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips), Bri grabbed a muffin. Bri did not immediately devour this muffin. In fact, she felt she needed a place to put the muffin to grab some cookies. Bri did not ask one of the able girls to hold the muffin, she did not put the muffin in her mouth, she did not put this muffin in her pocket, or on a plate, or any logical place whatsoever. Rather, she placed said muffin in between her breasts. She did not take out the muffin to walk the five minutes to our dorm, she kept the muffin in her chest, to see how many weird looks she would get. 


Yup... that's my roommate. Love her to death