I never knew that washing clothes could be so daunting a task. It was my freshman year of college, and everything was foreign to me as I was faced with the pressures of making new friends, adapting to a rigorous course load, and figuring out how to use a washer and dryer. I was enjoying the freedom that came with my mother no longer enforcing a curfew or lecturing me on the benefits of waiting until marriage, but I was dreading that she was no longer doing my laundry—a luxury I had enjoyed for 18 years of my life.
We all live under the illusion that the choice afforded to us by technology makes our lives easier and more enjoyable. We associate choice with autonomy, and we assume that having more choices will lead to greater freedom and ultimately better welfare. Innovations such as computers, cells phones and satellite radios have certainly given us opportunities not available to previous generations.
Yet both too many and too few choices can leave us equally frustrated. No one wants to endure a road trip with a broken CD player and three options for radio stations: Country, gospel or contemporary-Christian-country gospel. However, it's equally excruciating to be in a car with someone who can't make it through 30 seconds of one song before changing it to another.
With a basket of dirty laundry that had somehow survived a college introduction week of nonstop basketball and debauchery, I had my first real encounter with a washer and dryer. It was then that I began to wonder if increased choice was such a good thing after all. With five options for water levels, four options for temperature and three options for something I didn't quite understand, the choices seemed infinite. I needed help, but I had to face the task on my own. There was no way I could make a homesick call to my mother a week into celebrating my newfound independence.
My first confrontation came with water temperatures. The options were: Hot/cold, warm/warm, warm/cold, cold/cold. Warm/warm and cold/cold seemed unnecessarily redundant. I threw out those options due to my suspicion of things that are wordy, verbose and unnecessarily redundant. What was left was warm/cold or hot/cold. Given my distaste for most anything Katy Perry has ever produced, I decided upon warm/cold.
Delicate, regular or easy/care permanent press was the next barrier between me and a fresh basket of clothes. The first two were self-explanatory, but the third really threw me off. How can something be both easy and permanent? Good things in life don't come easy, and permanent change takes knowledge, time, effort, and systematically breaking old habits and replacing them with new ones. Lasting, meaningful change is no quick and easy gimmick. It's hard work.
""What to do?"" I asked myself as I tore pieces of hair from my scalp, which would surely clog the machine. At this point I was contemplating moving to Africa and washing my clothes in a river. Luckily a cute college co-ed came to my rescue. Like a scene out of a straight-to-DVD romantic comedy we exchanged glances and then she helped me with my laundry while we traded bad puns about washing clothes.
Luckily she didn't seem to mind my ""dirty laundry,"" and I was able to turn my ineptitude into an endearing flaw and landed a date with her later that night. I could hardly contain my excitement as I began to prepare for the date. However, as I shifted through my huge basket full of clean clothes, one uncomfortable thought crossed my mind: ""What do I wear?!""
E-mail Elliot at eignasiak@wisc.edu to discover whether figuring out the washing machine and landing a hot date are worth giving up mother pampering you for the rest of your life.
