dry my damp, damp heart

"Cleanliness is next to Godliness."

As a child, many parents instill this bit of wisdom into you. Nay, sometimes, they even beat it into you. That's how clean you were supposed to be.

"My child is as close to God as he or she can be!" parents all over seemed to scream to the heavens, holding up their pristine children with their spotless (and ironed) shirts as proof.

Of course, children generally aren't inclined to be clean. This is a product of the adults' own obsessions with cleanliness. Perhaps our parents' need for clean developed from their own parents' strict rules about freshness, which in turn developed from their parents' rules and on and on. A vicious rinse cycle, if you will.

Or, perhaps a certain gene acts as a countdown, of sorts, which usually activates around middle age (though there are always exceptions). One day, you're walking along, when - BAM - you feel an incredible urge to go home and do the laundry. Twice.

Now, parents and their children may feel the need to keep clean, whether through societal pressures and influences dictating that 'spotless' equals 'faultless' (for the former) or through the very real fear of getting grounded or receiving a swift smack to the side of the head (for the latter). But, there is a glaring exception to this general behavior, especially when it comes to laundry: the college student.

I'm referring specifically to the college student who isn't living at home (and who doesn't go home too often, taking their laundry with them). This is not to say that college students are filthy (though some certainly are), but cleanliness is no longer really what we care about.

Rather, we care about convenience.

Again, some students take this to an extreme by 'being too lazy' to shower or wash their clothes or walk to the bathroom to pee.

However, most students probably do all of the above, and regularly. When it comes to laundry, though, that's when all the years of living under our parents' dirt-seeking eyes seem to take a backseat. Granted, we'll still do our laundry - I did my laundry every single week in college. But, once I toss them into the washer, I don't really care if they're clean or not. The clothes could come out in the exact same state, with that glaring mustard stain unchanged in size or mustardness, and it wouldn't really matter.

The only thing I cared about after going to college was whether or not my clothes were fucking dry.

I could have taken the very obvious route to obtaining dry clothes by simply not washing my clothes in the first place. My childhood, though, had instilled in me a pretty fundamental dislike of dirt and sweat and the like, which I couldn't ignore. The other obvious route would be to deposit more quarters. Again, my childhood, in an Asian household in an Asian neighborhood, prevented me from spending that extra dollar (an extra $4 a month! an extra $36 a school year!). Plus, being a college student, I wasn't in the mood to wait around while my laundry dried. I wanted to get it over with so that I could go out and do something.

The clashing internal priorities only led to me carefully laying out my still-damp laundry on my bed week after week, hoping they'd dry before I went to sleep.

I would have learned my lesson after a while and just forked over the extra money (though actually willing to spend money and actually having quarters is a whole 'nother story), but that damned dryer would lull me into a false sense of security. The dryer would spit out my clothes nice and toasty often enough that I thought I could get away with depositing the same amount of money each week.

There were degrees to it too, so that it was always a gamble (I suppose this is why people can become addicted to gambling - you still have a chance of winning). Sometimes the $1.50 I threw in there would leave them very dry. Other times that $1.50 would leave little spots of dampness here and there. And sometimes the $1.50 would inexplicably leave my clothes just as wet as they were when I threw them in there an hour and half ago (and a dollar fifty richer, at that). It was like one of those toy machines in certain stores, where kids can place a few quarters to get a random toy or prize. Except with these dryers, it was either get a toy or get varying degrees of shit.

Having moved back home and doing laundry here, I realize now how naive I was in college; how trusting I was of the idea of a dryer. A dryer is meant to dry, right? Even if it was a coin-operated dryer in a crowded college dormitory, who was I to judge? I wanted to be fair, judicial, unbigoted. A dryer would dry my clothes - and that's that.

But the dryers let me down. So much so that as I progressed in my college eduction, I declared to the heavens, above the shouts of the parents waving their children in starched or pressed or ironed shirts, "Screw Godliness! I just want to be dry."