The Finite

Our laundry room is in the basement. There’s about 10 washers and 10 dryers. Luckily, there’s windows or else we’d all die of heatstroke and dryer fumes. There’s also irons for dummies. They have buttons and switches with pictures of clothes instead of settings. There’s a picture of blue jeans, panties, Capri pants even.

So my first laundry experience on my first Sunday night at 1:00 AM went pretty much without a hitch. This week, I went down with my laundry bag, detergent and my “delicates” (laptop and textbooks). Well, apparently I wore more pants on the second week because the dry detergent that I use wouldn’t dissolve. I removed my jeans to find large white stains on them. Apparently, I overloaded the washer and the powder wouldn’t dissolve completely. I had to pony up another just $1.50 just to create a second load from what I judged to be the least washed of the initial load. I also don’t have any stain remover, which is bad news for a sauce lover like myself.

The stories proved true.

• If you don’t remove your clothes from a finished machine, someone will commandeer it and pile your clothes on top.
• The laundry room is busy during the oddest of hours.
• It sucks ass to do laundry.

It remains operating from the early hours all the way to 3 in the morning. Those fourteen hours see their share of behavior. I came down once to find two Chinese students spooning on a table. But mostly people just watch Youtube or use their Macbooks to video conference with their boyfriends. (Not that that stopped the Chinese students.)

P.S. My cameras still out of commission, so no photos of the laundry room, or the place where I work or of the exhibitionists on my floor.

The asian food here is… unfortunate. I’m sorry if I sound pretentious, but I think that I know a fair bit more than most about it. Number one on the list of Asian foods: rice. The dining courts (buffets, remember) serve up big pans of long-grain, meaning that 9 times out of 10, it’s been microwaved or stir-fried. Hence, it has no “cling”, no stickiness that makes eating it with chopsticks possible. (They provide no chopsticks.) It’s simply too dry meaning that they don’t use rice steamers. Understandable, yet annoying.

Second on the list of Asian staple foods: Sweet and sour chicken. 4 times out of 5, it was way too salty. The only time it wasn’t too salty was at Ford dining court which is the only dining court where I saw a Chinese lady cooking it.

Last of all, there’s a restaurant in the Union called Lemongrass, which claims to serve Southeast Asian cuisine, like Thai and stuff. I thought it had potential as an approximation of the food back home until I actually received my food (from a white guy incidentally). My curry chicken was cold, bland, limp and had potato in it. POTATO! You don’t have potato in Asian cuisine. That’s like having a matzo ball floating next to a pork meatball. Unless you’re Ming Tsai, this is one thing you just do not do. It’s taboo. Like cooking and serving childhood pets after telling them that their pet duck flew away without saying goodbye.

I miss Plucky.