Soap Opera

So, today was laundry day. It simply came time to face the fact that I have been wearing the same pair of jeans for the last three days, using dish towels to wash my face, and substituting the bottom halves of my bikinis for underwear, and that I could afford to put it off no longer. So I load up my wheelie-cart until it's practically overflowing, arm myself with liquid detergent and quarters, and embark on the arduous journey.

Let it be known that there is a perfectly fine laundry room in the basement of my apartment building that I never use because A: my mother put the fear of God into me when I first moved in by relating horror stories about unaccompanied young women being brutally attacked in desolate basement laundry rooms and offering the advice to only go down there in the daytime and to carry pepper spray, and B: I have an irrational fear that my clothes would emerge smelling like a basement itself, coming out worse than when they went in. Luckily, there is a bright and modern laundromat only 2 buildings down from mine, so I frequent it often.

...Ok, fine, maybe not often enough.

Anyway...

Let it also be known that I live in a predominantly black neighborhood. "Predominantly" meaning there are often stretches during which my reflection in store windows is the only white person I see on the street for days. I have no problem with this, but having lived most of my life on Long Island, aka Wonder Bread Manor, it's definitely a new perspective.

So imagine my surprise when I stroll into the laundromat this afternoon and come face-to-face with a white boy sitting by one of the machines. A cute white boy. Writing in a journal, even! Be still my heart!

And of course, I realize upon this revelation, I'm wearing pajama pants and no makeup, my hair's completely disheveled, and I have to steer past him with an unwieldly heap of dirty underwear on wheels. I can really think of no better condition under which to start a flirtation than this.

Coward that I am, I avoid eye contact as I pass, sneak a sidelong look at him while shoveling my clothes into the machines, and leave the place by a completely circuitous route so I don't have to risk passing by him again. But I have a plan.

See, I'm going out later to see a friend bellydance, and I had planned to get ready after going back and picking up my clothes, but now I decide to doll myself up before heading back to the 'mat; this way when I run into Pretty Hipster Boy again, I'll be fully prepared. I want to look appropriately bellydance-ish, or at least as much as one can while garbed in skinny jeans and thigh-high boots, so I load on the bangles and the gauzy scarves and the exotic eye makeup and I'm off to retrieve my precious.

Unfortunately, by the time I get back, my boy toy is done and gone, so I now just look like a freakshow who's way too overdressed for the laundromat.

God damn it.

If anyone asks I'm telling them this is the only clean outfit I had left.