A few nights ago, as my Cav Advantage card was denied for the third time and my brights bled into each other in the dryer, I finally admitted to myself that before arriving on Grounds, I had highly romanticized the college laundry room.
At home, laundry was a strangely calming part of my weekly routine. I spent Sunday afternoons with sunlight streaming through the big window above the washer in the mudroom of my parents’ house, using as much fabric softener as my little heart could handle. My sister would help me fold the sheets, and we would never miss the opportunity to wrap ourselves up in them first.
Why wouldn’t it be the same in college? The laundry room would be a source of cleanliness and comfort, alive with the low, steady thrumming of a dozen washing machines which smell like “April Fresh,” “Lavender Meadow” and “Clean Linen” all at once, providing stressed-out students with the solace of a simple, routine task. And who doesn’t love the feeling of a warm towel, straight from the dryer?
This idyllic vision of the college laundry room also held the promise of flirtation. Every time I swiped in, I expected to find a gorgeous guy folding a T-shirt bearing the logo of my favorite band. I would commend his taste in music and our eyes would lock, the air heavy with the scent of his Bounce dryer sheets. He would offer me some of his Tide when I forgot mine so that I wouldn’t have to make the trip back upstairs. Our would fingers brush when he handed me the cap, and we would teach our grandkids always to separate their whites and their colors.
This vision was painfully wrong.
I dread the laundry room. The hamper I keep shamefully stowed away in my closet overflows by the week’s end, and my wardrobe becomes significantly less organized as the days pass by. It’s not until I’m left with a single pair of leggings and a T-shirt from my high school field day that I venture down the stairs to the dungeon.
It is a whole other world down there. The grey tile floor is covered in a film of detergent and lint, which explodes from the traps the second they are pulled from the machines. Someone else’s sock — or worse, some abandoned pair of lace underwear — is consistently stuck in the rubber seal inside the washer door and, chances are, I will not know what to do with it when it pops up during load changeover. Even though there are twice as many dryers as there are washers, each one except number 12 — which has been broken since the semester started — will be playing host to piles of quickly wrinkling sweatpants that have almost definitely been there since the last time I braved the place.
Perhaps even more disappointing is learning that the only guaranteed laundry room interaction is awkwardly avoiding eye contact with anyone who is folding his or her clothes, or trying not to listen in on a frantic conversation with one’s mother about how to un-shrink a wool sweater or get the red dye out of now-pink shirts.
Seeing as I change my outfit a minimum of three times a day here, the laundry room is an unfortunate necessity in college. Gone are the days when I could sort my clothes into two dozen rainbow-hued piles, ensuring each color stayed bright and that my whites were bleached to perfection. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to get used to this feeling.
College is easily romanticized — and, standing in the fluorescent lighting, choking on the cloud of lint that I had stirred up, it occurred to me that the sooner I abandon the idea that these four years are going to be exactly as they appear in the admissions brochure, the sooner I can open myself up to the real college experience.
It’s not always going to be how I pictured it. Sometimes I’m going to have to stay up until 4 a.m. to finish the paper I’ve been procrastinating away for a month. Sometimes it’s going to rain, and I’m going to have to walk across Grounds without my umbrella. Sometimes I am going to have to roll my sleeves up and move someone else’s clothes from the dryer because it’s been half an hour and I need clean towels, damn it. But if I can conquer the college laundry room, I’m sure the rest will follow suit in good time.
Kristin’s column runs biweekly Tuesdays. She can be reached at k.murtha@cavalierdaily.com.
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