Washday Sunday: Tales from this Godforsaken Whatever

There is never a week that I don’t get my hands chemically-burned by commercial detergents. I’ve tried different variants of different brands but I end up with sore fingers, which usually takes about five days for the blisters to dry up. The stingy feel, especially when run by and soaked in water, lasts for about a day.

When life was still easy and little bit convenient, we had the washing machine. Every middle class family probably owns this piece of appliance that I think is semi-useless save perhaps for the all-too-good promise of convenience and the economic inevitability of purchasing power brought about by the occasional increase in income. Some who can afford to have manang labandera doing the laundry for them, choose to have the dependable hands of humanity rather than the regurgitating wheel that spins and loops your clothes.

So while I still bask in the far-off reality of a laundromat in some big-shot city like NYC, Indian-sitting with a book in hand and an iPod in my ears, or the perverted thought of a quickie sex with some hot chick atop the frenzied machines on a lazy and gloomy morning, I have to make do with the refuge of the shade on a makeshift small bench on a scorching Sunday morning, with pestering flies like tiny black helicopters hovering over the liquefied suds beside my feet, the doggie stench of Scooby, drifting off to thoughts that would make me forget I'm ruining my precious fingers.