towels

For some unknown reason, Costco doesn’t carry the amazing towels they have carried for years anymore. The replacements don’t look promising in person. I think they also cost more… by about 38%. I shall check again when I go to the store at the end of the week (to get final stuff for my birthday party that is happening this Sunday) and confirm this price difference. I then likely will purchase one more set of the amazing towels from online (only a dollar and a penny in shipping cost). I haven’t yet decided what to do about the new ones – do I try a pair and return if we don’t love them??

We shall see. First step is the pricing. Check that, then proceed with next evaluation of what to do.

Can you even imagine someone not finding this situation to be ‘a situation’? This is a big deal. How could someone not see this as a big deal?? Having good towels is extremely important in life. A bad towel just makes for a bad day (or night, depending on when one showers), I’m telling you. 😛

Post-a-day 2023

Guess(t) what!

I keep going back to how, when I was staying with a friend at her house, – yes, a house and not an apartment – she was very excited to inform me that she had guest towels now. She was so utterly excited about that fact, likely on account of its sounding so grown-up like, that I didn’t say anything about it. However, it seems to be that this is her first time of having guest towels, right? Well, I have noticed in the past that one of the first things I do, whenever I move in somewhere, is prepare for the possibility of a guest or guests coming to stay with me. This has always included having extra towels for these guests to use, and enough blankets and pillows, as well as a handful of other things I consider to be important to have available for a guest’s use.

Now, one might think that I have guests over all the time, if this is something I always seem to do. I actually think I don’t often have guests stay over, and it has been almost never for my current place of residence this past year and a half. However, I definitely have had people come stay with me at each of my other residences…, and plenty of those times were last-minute or spur-of-the-moment or totally unplanned sleepovers. Because of that, I have always just made sure that I am prepared… you never know when the opportunity will arise, right? That’s how I see it, anyway, and so I make sure that I am always prepared.

If only we could get the part of me that keeps my living space super tidy to view things that way, too, so that I just would keep my living space always tidy… Alas, it does not see things that way so far, and my clutter-y messiness wins out on a regular basis still. I am, however, working on improvement in that area, and have improved much already in recent years. And I have finally accepted that, well, I am messy – not dirty, but messy, untidy – with my living and working spaces. That acknowledgement has definitely helped me to plan a little extra mental space and time to spend tidying up regularly, and so the tidiness has lasted longer and longer lately, and the messy stages shorter and shorter!

Anyway, I’m off to sleep – much still to do in the next day or so, before I head home…, and I am still very tired and sleepy after the car ride yesterday. I went 872.0 miles, with an average of 27.9 miles per gallon through hill after hill in a lovely Jeep Compass for 13 hours and 42 minutes of drive time yesterday, going from Madison, Wisconsin, to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I left at 4:45 in the morning from my brother’s driveway, and arrived in my cousin’s at 20:22 (that’s 8:22pm), meaning I spent 15 hours and 37 minutes on the road, in some capacity or other. (Though, I really enjoyed the part that involved taking fabulous photos of the Bridges of Madison County, despite the snakes everywhere!) That’s a lot for a day, especially after having gone to bed at midnight the night before, and struggled to sleep at all due to paranoia around potential bug bites… (It turned out to have been from hiking on Friday that I got the bites, and they just didn’t show up until Saturday morning, all itchy and swollen and red, leaving me to think that something was in the bed, biting me overnight… but, we didn’t piece that together until last night, after I was long gone from the imagined bed bugs that had kept me out of restful sleep those four hours of planned sleep.)

So, anyway, I’m off to sleep now. Goodnight, all! 😉

Post-a-day 2020

Towels and Conversations

In my first year of college, whenever I’d have an evening shower, I usually would end up down the hall afterward. The social and clearly labeled “extrovert” end of the hall was always booming when the girls were in, and I always would go down to check in when I heard the chatter. (I had been assigned the introvert end of the hallway, and, somewhat ironically, I was the only one in the hallway who knew everyone else. I just like to get to know the people around me, and so college was no exception to that.) This meant that, come evening time on weekdays, I would spend some portion of the time down the hall, socializing, so to speak.

And, as mentioned, this included the time immediately following my evening showers. And so, I would be hanging out down the hall, hair wrapped in one towel and body in another, both holding tightly, as though sewn into place. Totally normal for me.

One night, one of the most outgoing girls asked me about how on Earth I can be so comfortable in just a towel… Wasn’t I worried it would fall off?… Or that I was naked underneath??? No, not at all, I told her. And I explained why I wasn’t. First, we were all girls, so I saw no issue anyway (though I had no intention of anyone seeing anything under the towel). Secondly, I grew up with older sisters who had seemed to spend a third of their time at home (when in college) walking around in a towel or two, and so it was very normal for me. And, from a very young age, I had learned their tricks of how to make the towel stay in place, and, naturally, I had mastered it by college. So, it never seemed dangerous for me to be hanging out down the hall – this was after the curfew when boys had already been kicked out, mind you – in a towel. It was like hanging out in almost any other clothing.

She had trouble believing that the towel was stuck, and so I even did a little shaking around to show how it wouldn’t fall off. Nevertheless, she still was terrified of ever doing such a thing herself, and I was amazed that this towel tying trick wasn’t common knowledge or part of common use. I think I even showed them right then and there how I tied the towel (without opening it, of course). These were the girls who talked about just about everything with one another, quite openly, and yet they were somehow terrified at the thought of showing their bodies to one another. I still have a certain shyness about my body, but, in certain contexts, it’s very so what to me. Like in onsen, the Japanese hot baths, it is absolutely no big deal to show my body and to see other women’s bodies. And in theatre, for costume changes, it happens sometimes… oh, well… it’s no issue. It just happens.

To this day – last time was Friday evening – I still walk around in my towel and chat comfortably with people after I shower. My high school ‘big sister’ was known for always saying, in response to a compliment about her clothing, “I’m naked under this.” The initial shock always wore away when, after a few moments of consideration, the listener realized that we all were naked underneath whatever outfit we were wearing – that’s kind of how it works when you put something on in the first place. For me, there is little difference between clothing and a towel. Plenty of people regularly don’t wear underwear, and men don’t wear bras, so we’re just as naked under a towel as we are under most clothing. (It’s just what in our minds that messes with us and makes us uncomfortable.) That’s why, even when I’d shower in college, and a guy would be in the hallway when I was heading back to my room in just a towel, I was unconcerned. I’d even talk with them, if I knew them. It seems that, if they were concerned about talking with me, they could always excuse themselves and leave. That’s what my friends and I would do if we had an issue with a guy in only a towel. (But that really isn’t much of an issue to me, mostly too due to my upbringing with older siblings.)

(I somehow feel harsh or demanding with all of that…, but I didn’t mean to be; not in the least. People can always do as they prefer – I’m just sharing why I am so comfortable in such a silly situation, and why I see it a totally normal, despite its being totally awkward for plenty of people. I mean, my ukulele teacher is someone I met when we both were bathing in an onsen, naked, of course.) 😛

Post-a-day 2018

Snuggles

One of my favorite feelings is what ensues whenever I wrap myself up in towels – one for my hair and a big one for my body – after a warm shower in a cool room, and I collapse sideways onto the bed.

After a while spent snuggling in my towel in the bed, the towel in my hair comes apart, my hair falling, flowing, rolling out of it onto the bed in spurts as I roll onto my back.

And I just rest there for a while, in a place of bliss, nowhere to go and nothing to do but dry slowly from the shower and relax.

And that’s what I do.

Post-a-day 2018

Tying up dirty boys with grammar

Changing laundry from the washing machine to the dryer (It’s a machine, I know!!!!!!!*), I saw a towel on the floor between the two machines. It was originally intended for the load of red shades earlier today, but the load was too large for comfort, so I pulled out the towel. I left it on the floor, because a towel load needed to be done today or tomorrow anyway, so why bother bringing it back upstairs just to bring it back down only hours later? But that isn’t the point.

The point is (sort of) that I saw the towel sitting there, and I had an almost-urge to pick it up and put it in the dryer with the laundry I was transferring. Not that I wanted to put it in with the clean laundry, but that, usually, whenever something is on the floor there, it is because it has fallen in the transfer between the two machines. So, I simultaneously wanted not to touch the towel, to put it in the dryer, and to move it to the dirty towels upstairs (since I wasn’t doing the final two loads tonight, but doing them tomorrow). And, for a good moment, I was worried that I would pursue the final of the three, and accidentally fulfill the second in my tiredness and in the middle of routine muscle movements, and then wish for the first.

I managed to let go of having to deal with the towel now, and I left it on the floor, for fear of the second result.

As I thought about that possible second result, I was practically distraught at how it would ruin the fact that I had already put the load of clothes on to wash. By putting one single towel in the dryer, I thought, an entire load of laundry would be considered dirty. Now, why doesn’t that work the other way around? Why does one piece of clean laundry not make a load of dirty laundry clean, when mixed together? The dirty still win out. And how come a whole load of clean laundry can’t overpower the one dirty article? The clean just can’t overcome.

And then – now, this is the point of this all – I wondered about what is life is like this, if anything. Almost immediately, I thought about gender pronouns (and particularly in Spanish and French, because I learned those first). It’s just like guys and girls. A group full of guys, the dirty clothes, is (let’s use French) ils. Add one girl, the clean clothing, and it stays ils. A group full of girls is elles. Add one boy, and it becomes ils.

So, no matter what, if there are any boys, it is ils, dirty. The only way to keep it elles is to have only girls – no boys allowed.

And how odd that the boys are the dirty laundry and the girls are the clean… so like life, and I hadn’t even intended it to be so.**

Anyway, isn’t all of that fun?! Towels to grammar to life comparisons – I do lead an extraordinarily interesting life, huh? 😛

*Japan doesn’t exactly do dryers. People are expected to hang clothes outside, because every has a stay-at-home wife, you see… not. Everyone used to have a stay-at-home wife, but the lifestyle hasn’t changed. It just takes days and days to do laundry as a solo-liver, because weather can decide to soak your clean clothes while you’re off at work, or hide the sun from them, or be too humid for them to dry at all until they start to smell of mildew… I just hung mine all indoors, because I’d heard too many stories from my brother’s issues. Plus, supposedly people steal women’s underwear from the drying clothes in Japan. I didn’t need to deal with any of that nonsense. So, I set my air conditioner to a daytime setting to keep the apartment mildew-free, which also helped dry my clothes!

** I once wrote a poem about how boys are dirty. I didn’t exactly believe any of it, but I knew that people thought boys were dirty and smelly, and I rolled with the idea.

Post-a-day 2017