Pants

"And you're not bringing those to England!" Mom said as we were leaving the mall yesterday (we'd been wasting time--well, and she'd been wasting money--there until Dad got off work and we could go eat).

As if it wasn't bad enough that she says I need new shirts because mine are all "umpteen" years old--as if oldness is a good enough reason, as if keeping old shirts around is not in fact an indication that I really like them--now she says I'm not bringing the Che Guevara pants to England.

(Oh, the Che Guevara pants, so named by comradexavier because they're army green and have lots of pockets and thus apparently make him think of Latin American guerillas, are my favorite pair of pants, by far. But recently they mysteriously developed mysterious purple stains on one leg, and this drives my mom berserk. I am, truly, amazed that she still washes them and puts them back in my closet instead of unilaterally terminating them with extreme prejudice. I'm amazed she lets me out of the house wearing them at all. True, I'm not a big fan of the random purple stain--really, it looks like a bleach stain except I don't use bleach and it's purple instead of white and I have no idea how it got there; they were just like that when I took them out of the drawer one day--but I am a big fan of these pants, and I really do not care what they look like. My mom, of course, only cares what they look like.)

I refuse to go a whole summer without my Che Guevara pants. Though of course I can't say that. She is still expecting me to put up a fight, though, and I do. I'm being unfairly oppressed here! Even the alleged two weeks would be sad enough (if more tolerable). And I'm the reasonable one here, the one saying, "Why not? Nobody cares!" (I say that to her a lot. Always with the implied "...except you!" I never say that; she sometimes does.) She's the one saying, "You don't take such things overseas." As if this is an obvious rule, one everybody knows about. Pants with purple on the knee might be fine for sitting around in America, but certainly not for other countries!

This part of the conversation was held as we were getting in the car to meet Dad, and a minute later when we got out of the car, the first thing he said when he saw me was "How'd you get purple on your pants?!"

I laughed and told him it'd been like that for a long time.

Then I turned to Mom and said, "See? Nobody even notices, I told you!"

I lose the battles with her, even when I'm right. But I'm used to that. She can have her supposed moral victories; I'm taking the Che Guevara pants to England.

I knew I should've replaced that duct tape!

I just heard this loud banging coming from the other end of the house, but it didn't last too long and so it was over before I realized what it was. But I did recognize it; I've heard it a few times this week. Oh, I thought, that must mean the washing machine is running but the dryer's not!

I was right.

Impressed at my Sherlockian ability to detect the state of appliances from such a distance? Elementary, my dears.

You see, the door on the front of the dryer broke a while ago, so instead of opening only to a position wherein it's parallel with the floor, it drops down past that--not quite to the floor, but past the normal limit of its hinges. Then it broke more so besides this, it also wouldn't stay closed. And the dryer, like my Discman, will not run if it's not properly closed in the first place. So my parents got a big stick--not a branch kind of stick, a dowel kind of stick, big and heavy and a couple feet long--and when you want to use the dryer, you brace once end under the lip of the handle on the dryer lid, and the other end where the opposite wall of the laundry room meets the floor. (In this respect, it's a good thing that it's a skinny room.)

One gets used to things like hearing the dryer's buzzer go off, wandering into the laundry room, nonchalantly whacking the stick and letting the dryer fall open, careful to keep toes out of its way, and pulling clothes out of the dryer.

But when the dryer's not being used, there's no reason to be so careful about the dryer door...yet one does not want it hanging open all the time, as that's about as inconvenient as the stick as far as getting to the other side of the room is concerned. (In this respect, it's a bad thing that it's a skinny room.) Plus, it's just silly.

Though the solution might be just as silly... One of my parents put two pieces of duct tape at the top of the door to stick it to the dryer and hold it shut--more or less shut, close enough for government work. Close enough, that is, unless the washer's running. If the washer and dryer are both running, the stick will be there and it's no problem. But if the dryer's not running, only the duct tape (which is losing its adhesivity as it gets unstuck and re-stuck to the dryer more and more often) is holding it closed, and the shaking motion of the washer might make it peel off and thus the dryer door will fall open on its broken hinges and bounce up and down a little bit with the momentum, thus producing the distinctive banging noise I heard.