So yesterday it was nice and quiet, and I caught up on a few chores. Among them was getting the laundry done. For whatever reason, doing the laundry fills me with existential angst.
It used to not be that way. A decade or so back, doing the laundry was one of those random tasks that made a place feel like home. There was something soothing about hearing the dryer running. It was one of those homelike white-noise things that made you want to take a nap. I could hear the dryer running, and it made me somehow feel everything was okay.
Cut to a few years later, maybe my second or third year teaching. I'd been burned at one job, and had this feeling that the one I'd just gotten was going to blow up in my face. Sunday afternoon meant laundry detail. In the evening, as I'd sit in the floor and fold these warm, clean clothes, I came to associate it with another week about to begin. And the dread that I felt would come. The red light on the telephone. Imagining it would be the academic dean wanting to have a conference with me about something I'd done, or hadn't done. Funny, those things never happened. But every Sunday, I'd live in fear of it happening.
It's now years later. I'm comfortably settled into this job, I have a certain degree of seniority, and so on. I know my way around the institution. I've taught enough to have the savvy to stay out of most forms of trouble. But, still, to this day, a basket full of warm, unfolded laundry, especially on a Sunday afternoon, can give me about three-percent nausea, and it's six years ago all over again.
I don't know why.
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