Nice Guys

 If you're looking for a "nice guy", check under one of these.

There’s a term that gets tossed around all the time in Reddit comment sections, Facebook status updates, and idle male chatter that makes me roll my eyes hard enough to cause serious ocular damage. The term is “nice guy”, and it’s done more to tarnish the reputation of sexually frustrated young men than any Judd Apatow movie – and as a sexually frustrated young man, that really offends me. I’m mad as hell, and I’m going to spend the next 950 words explaining why I’m mad!

For the uninitiated among you, men use terms like “nice guy” when discussing their (usually unsuccessful) relations with women. Here’s an example:

“Sloan and I hang out at the mall and talk on the phone all the time, but she just started going steady with that jerk Chad who works at the travel agency! I don’t get why girls always date bogus losers but never nice guys like me – they avoid me like the Noid! I also don’t get why it’s apparently the 1980s in this example.”

The gist of it is that “nice guys” believe themselves to be love’s long suffering martyrs: Despite the fact that they’re nothing but respectful and courteous to the women in their life, those cold-hearted bitches never think of them as anything more than friends. Hang around a group of younger men long enough and you’re bound to hear a “nice guy” griping about being trapped in some girl’s “friendzone” – a sexless place where cruel women imprison “nice guys” and force them to watch and listen as they get their hearts broken by one douche boyfriend after another.

What disgusts me about “nice guys” is that they seem to believe that men who are polite should be allowed to have sex with whoever they want to, and that any woman who doesn’t play ball with that notion is a manipulative bitch who has emasculated them. In that regard, self-proclaimed “nice guys” are really Al Bundy-style chauvinist assholes.

I hold doors open for people, recycle, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ use my turn signals, make eye contact with waiters and laugh at their jokes – even the ones that aren’t funny.* I’m a nice guy. And when I’m trying to describe things about myself that I believe make me attractive to the opposite sex, the fact that I’m nice doesn’t even make the list because there isn’t anything hot about common courtesy!    

*”Ha ha ha! Did you hear that, guys? The dessert special is Very Berry Cobbler! It rhymes and it’s descriptive of the dessert’s fruit content!”

“Hi, I test my smoke detectors every six months – can I buy you a drink?”

“You may not know it to look at me, but I’ve never once eaten somebody else’s lunch out of the fridge at work. Mind if I have a seat?”

“Hey baby. I always make sure to park less than six inches away from the curb to ensure that my car doesn’t impede the flow of traffic. Want to get out of here?”

I’m going to say in all seriousness something that will make a lot of my readers laugh harder than any other line I’ve put on this blog in five years: I, Truman Capps, have some idea of what women want.

Women want to be with someone interesting. I know this because I want to be with someone interesting, and I’m of the controversial opinion that men and women are not only members of the same species but also are looking for similar things in a romantic partner.

“Nice guys” who are reading this: Suppose you know a girl who really, really likes you. Her greatest point of pride is the fact that she has good manners. She doesn’t have any particular interests, doesn’t read or watch much TV, no real goals or aspirations, and her only hobby is being nice.

“What did you do this weekend?”

“I was nice! I went to the park and was nice to people, and then I got lunch and was really nice to my waiter, and then I just went home and was nice alone for a couple of hours before going to bed early. Thank you for asking! How about you?”

Would you really want to invest a huge amount of your time and energy in that person? If the answer is no, then why the hell would you expect a woman to be bowled over by you when “niceness” is the one thing that supposedly sets you apart from other guys?

Being nice is pleasant, but not interesting. It’s possible to be nice and interesting – holla back, Ryan Gosling! – but between the two, interesting is the real panty dropper. Women date assholes because assholes tend to be interesting enough to make up for their lack of niceness.* Full stop. That’s the secret. Where’s my Nobel Prize?

*The vast majority of the women I know are dating guys who are so interesting, wonderful, and nice that I wish I was dating them.

The good news for “nice guys” is that everyone is interesting. My advice to any “nice guy” desperate enough to listen to pickup tips from the single guy with a blog would be to take the time you spend on the Internet talking about how unappreciated your “niceness” is and invest it in the qualities and activities that you think make you interesting.

Sooner or later you’re bound to meet a woman through this activity (provided your interesting activity isn’t competitive helicopter dicking) who shares your interests, and then you’ll discover that being in a relationship with someone you care about is its own can of worms.

I hope that at no point in this update I’ve given the impression that I consider myself an expert on women, because I’m far from it. I think a lot of this ought to be common sense, but it seems like every day I see some “nice guy” claiming that all women are stupid or evil because he’s been rejected by a few of them, opting to write off 51% of humanity when the common denominator in all of his failures is him.

If you’re “nice” because you expect something in return, you’re actually kind of an asshole – and not even the cool, dangerous type of asshole who gets laid.

Truman Capps apologizes profusely to his mother for using the term 'panty dropper' in his blog.  

Beginnings And Endings

How many times have they all gathered around a computer to watch something on this show? 

Late in the seventh season of The Office, Michael Scott quits Dunder Mifflin so he can move to Colorado with his fiancée. Sitting in a hotel bar waiting to meet with the man who will replace him as manager, he winds up unwittingly striking up a conversation with the man who will replace him as manager, played by Will Ferrell. Each oblivious to the other’s identity, they talk about work and their mutual love for the Olympics. (“I always wanted to do an animal Olympics.” “What happened?” “Life happened. Plus the monkeys would win everything.”)

At one point, Will Ferrell’s character lifts his glass in a toast. “To beginnings and endings!”

Michael Scott raises his own, dutifully trying to one-up him. “And middles, the unsung heroes!” 

Now that we’ve seen the full scope of what The Office had to offer us, that quote rings especially true. When The Office began it was a clumsy, hollow copy of the English series; when it ended it was a clumsy, sentimental copy of itself. But an awful lot of funny shit happened in the middle that made us forgive the show for its rougher edges.

The series finale of The Office was not a great episode. “The Injury”, “Michael Scott Paper Company”, or most of the Christmas episodes would’ve blown it straight out of the water in a quality contest, but I guess we can forgive that because it was an ending, and it’s almost impossible to make people laugh when you’re also telling them that a bunch of people they’ve known for 9 years are going away forever.

I didn’t like the finale because I don’t like long goodbyes. I don’t like long goodbyes because they open up the door for a whole lot of sentimentality, which I really don’t like, and which The Office has been trading in pretty heavily for the past couple of seasons now.

In the middle of the series, when The Office was at its best, it was a show about a bunch of people who didn’t have a lot in common and in many cases didn’t even like one another, their ordinary workplace gripes complicated by an incompetent manager who wanted everybody to be friends. 

When Oscar got sick of looking at Angela’s picture of babies playing musical instruments (back before the writers had truly committed to making her a crazy cat lady), Michael’s response was to make Oscar wear the poster like a shirt as a compromise – that way Angela could keep her poster in the one place where Oscar couldn't see it. In the process, they both wound up more miserable and angry at each other, and it was hilarious, because miserable people are one of the funniest things in the world. 

As the show drew to a close, though, the writers felt the need to start making everybody be friends. Phyllis and Stanley suddenly had a deep connection, Angela and Oscar moved in together to raise her baby, and the entire staff demanded an inexplicable goodbye dance party with Darryl before he left.

It’s really sweet to see people we’ve invested in over the past decade begin to come together and love one another as we love them. But it’s not terribly funny, and when it is it isn’t nearly as funny as those people squabbling over the thermostat and barely tolerating their micromanaging boss. And I think sitcoms should always be as funny as possible.

That’s why a finale – especially for a show that’s been on as long as this one – is basically a no-win situation. The Office was at its best when it was reveling in mediocrity and failure, commemorating trivial victories with sidelong smiles or foil tops from yogurt containers. But when everything comes to an end, everybody – even the cynics like me – wants to see that the characters we love are achieving their dreams and living happily ever after.

Endings aren’t so much about laughs as they are about closure, so maybe I shouldn’t be judging the episode on how funny it was.

I’m glad Angela and Dwight got married. The show has been setting them up for basically its entire run; I would’ve set Greg Daniels’ house on fire if they threw all that away in service of some godawful spinoff like The Farm, which NBC thankfully didn’t pick up.

I’m glad Jim and Pam worked things out and moved to Austin. I didn’t like the way the writers handled Jim and Pam’s tension over the course of the season – the whole thing felt kind of manufactured and then tied up pretty neatly in a matter of minutes – but them leaving Dunder Mifflin to do something hip, cool, and edgy is kind of what the show has been building to for years. 

Seeing Michael come back filled me with giddy, childlike joy, which was promptly replaced by giddy, childlike confusion when he only delivered two lines before disappearing. I’m well aware that the finale was about the show and not about the long absent Michael, but this is the guy who made the show what it was – he couldn’t have at least made a hilarious best man toast before disappearing back into TV legend?

I didn’t like Nellie simply being handed a baby for two reasons: 1) I’m pretty sure there’s a number of well justified state and federal laws preventing you from just grabbing a momentarily wayward infant and declaring yourself its mother, and 2) Who the fuck is Nellie and why was she ever on this fucking show!?!

Stanley carving a bird version of Phyllis was the one sentimental moment that really got to me. (Well, that and Michael having two phones full of pictures of his kids – along with two phone bills.) 

I love that Kevin – who in earlier seasons showed a natural aptitude for cooking – bought a bar, and I stand by my belief that a show about Kevin’s bar would be the best possible spinoff, especially if Oscar and Phyllis were patrons. That said, they’d need to up Kevin’s intelligence a bit; am I the only one who liked him better back in season 3 when he was a perverted rock and roll dullard instead of the mentally handicapped child he’s been in recent years?

Toby has been one of my favorite characters for the entire series – although, like Kevin, I preferred him when he was just a put upon loser and not a total creep – and I was pissed that his ending didn’t match the happiness of the others. I know I said a lot about mediocrity and failure earlier, but Toby is the one person who I wanted to see become an inexplicable success – a rich, world famous author with a supermodel wife to make up for nine years of torment at Michael and Andy’s hands. 

Image by Zack Wallenfang.

Ryan and Kelly’s ending was hands down the funniest and the truest to what the show was initially about – people stuck in a rut. They deserve each other, and they’re doomed to spend their lives falling in and out of love – not that they seem to care.

I was sorry to see so little of Clark Duke and “Plop”, the two fresh faces added at the beginning of the season. I enjoyed the addition of two younger, saner straight men into the maze of traditions, inside jokes, and love triangles (hexagons?) that had developed by season 9; I would’ve gladly had Nellie shipped off to Siberia for the season to give them more storylines and more time at the end. 

The ending of The Office was as good as it possibly could be. These characters, along with we diligent viewers who’ve ridden the show out through thick and thin, deserved a happy ending, and we got one. It wasn’t hilarious, but it couldn’t be happy and hilarious, and given the choice I’m glad that they went for happy in spite of all my earlier grumblings about sitcoms needing to be funny.

The Office is now a part of television history. In years to come, kids are going to discover The Office in weekday syndication and fall in love with it the same way I did with Seinfeld. Episodes of The Office are going to inspire some of those kids to become TV-loving comedy nerds, and the finale is not going to be one of those episodes. And that’s fine. 

The finale succeeded at completing The Office, so that when we go back to those stellar episodes from seasons 2, 3, 4, and 5, we can know that everything turns out okay in the end for (almost) everybody. And knowing that, maybe we can laugh all the harder when we watch these people sniping, bickering, and getting their feet caught in George Foreman grills. 

No matter how funny miserable people are, it’s always funnier when you know they’ll be okay in the end. 

Truman Capps has probably written more blogs about The Office than any other subject.  

Dry Hot San Fernando Valley Summer

Cheap rent, laid back nightlife, artsy cafes and galleries, hell on Earth for half the year. 

Something that I’ve complained and written many a blog about is the fact that summers in LA – particularly the San Fernando Valley, where I live – are roughly equivalent to getting a Dutch oven from planet Earth. Between the triple digit temperatures that inexplicably persist after sundown, stagnant smoggy haze that settles into the city like cottage cheese, or body odors on the Metro that are also reminiscent of cottage cheese, summer is the time that all the worst things in LA get worse.

I have very few coping mechanisms for LA heat. Summer in Oregon was just a six week break between rainstorms; a mild, peaceful, and beautiful time that every year entices hundreds of vacationing Californians to move north with no foreknowledge of what the other 10 and a half months are like. Every summer there’s usually one unbearably hot week in July during which I would lie on the floor in front of a fan moaning – and then, before you know it, it would start raining again.

If you live in Oregon and want to get an idea for what I’m dealing with this summer, park your car in direct sunlight at the beginning of that unbearably hot week in July and then, after about three days, go sit in it with all the windows rolled up. For the most authentic LA experience, fart a couple of times, listen to a looping CD of a police helicopter, and don’t get out of your car until late October.

I’d love to lie on the floor in front of a fan moaning for five months at a time – that’s actually my plan for retirement – but unlike my lazy childhood summers in Oregon I have bills to pay now, so every summer I have to find a way to beat the heat.

Two summers ago I sublet the same apartment I’m currently living in for two months between my junior and senior year of college while I worked nights logging and capturing footage for a ghost hunting reality TV show. This meant I had to sleep during the 105 degree days in an East-facing room that was as far as possible from the apartment’s sole A/C unit in the living room.

At first, my strategy to beat the heat that summer was to go into the living room with my roommates and stand in front of the A/C unit in my underwear. Unfortunately I couldn’t sleep out there since my roommates needed the living room during the day, so before long I just lay in my sweltering room and allowed the heat to beat me, hoping that either the sun would get tired of ruining my life or I’d grow to love my Arrakis-style environment.

It was a character building experience, and like most character building experiences I’d do just about anything to avoid repeating it. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about that – my 40-year-old apartment complex doesn’t have central air,* and even if I could fit comfortably inside our refrigerator I doubt I could live in there all summer long.   

*There are only three things that have ever made me consider the possibility that there might be a benevolent God taking care of our race: Pretzel bread sandwiches, Alison Brie, and central air conditioning. 

The only cooling technology in our apartment is our aforementioned wall-mounted AC unit in the living room, which effectively cools about 40% of the apartment and sounds like a bus crash doing it. I’ve experimented with box fans, which have proven to be very useful for blowing hot air around the apartment and not much else.

I was fully prepared to just move back to Oregon for the summer when I discovered the existence of portable air conditioners – mobile A/C units that cool down a room without having to be painstakingly (and dangerously) mounted in a window. The only downside is that getting a portable air conditioner requires you to spend money, something I have a well documented aversion to, but in this case I hate sweating far more than I hate spending.

Once purchased and installed, my brand new portable air conditioner looks like this:

I can’t help but think that there could be something a little more elegant about this design. You don’t see a lot of enormous collapsible ductwork anymore these days, and having a contraption that looks like an iron lung in my room has taken some getting used to.

But I really shouldn’t bitch about appearances – this thing keeps my room so frosty cool that it could look like Rick Perry’s big dumb face and I’d still love it. The machine blasts cool air and vents the hot air in my room back outside via the big tube; I get a certain assholey satisfaction from knowing that I’m making the outdoors slightly hotter in order to make my space cooler.

Now that I have such precise control of my climate, though, the rest of the world is an even bigger letdown than before. My room already has TV, the Internet, video games, and a private bathroom – now that I can turn it into a walk-in meat freezer at the touch of a button I can’t see any reason to leave until October, short of a pretzel bread sandwich or Alison Brie.

Truman Capps prefers climate control to social interaction.

Hertz Doughnut

Chevy Chase OWNS that line, you bastards!

I’ve been having a real devil of a time finding a decent mechanic in this town.* Regular readers will remember that last summer I spent a large amount of money having The Mystery Wagon “fixed” by a friendly-yet-incompetent Russian mechanic who repaired my steering gear while simultaneously breaking my horn and permanently turning my airbag light on. They probably teach this “one step forward, two steps back” method of auto repair in shitty mechanic school as a means to make sure your customers always have something that needs fixing.

*I know I’m writing two car-related updates in a row; this is not a coincidence. Over the next month I’m going to gradually phase out the long winded, narcissistic rambling and pop culture-related updates and transition this into a blog about Subaru repair and maintenance. I know this may be upsetting to some of you, but the idea tested really well in focus groups. 

In the months since, I’ve gone to three or four different mechanics to try and repair the damage done by my first mechanic, all of whom have looked at my car and failed to fix the existing problems while diagnosing several new ones and either wasting my time or outright disrespecting me in the process. (All of them have had near-perfect Yelp scores too, so fuck you, crowdsourcing.)

The result is that I now know there are a laundry list of things wrong with my car and a laundry list of mechanics who I don’t trust to fix them. Further complicating the matter is the fact that some of the mechanics have dismissed the other mechanics’ diagnoses. I don’t know if I should believe Incompetent Mechanic 1 who says I need new engine mounts, Incompetent Mechanic 2 who says my engine mounts are fine but ominously pronounced my left front wheel “loose”, or if I should just trust neither of them being as they’re both incompetent and seem to have started learning English at about the same time I graduated from high school.

The upshot is that being caught in traffic is never boring now – I’m always on the edge of my seat, wondering both if something is going to go wrong with my car on this outing, and if so, which thing? Will it be the engine mounts, the left wheel, or maybe a last-minute upset in the form of a freak electrical fire? It’s like March Madness, except I lose every time and my car is the only thing to suffer a gruesome, career ending injury. 

This situation isn’t sustainable, so I’ve decided to bite the bullet and take The Mystery Wagon to the one mechanic in Los Angeles who I both like and trust: A man named Cal who did some minor repair work on my car over a year ago. The best thing about Cal is that he grew up speaking the same language that I grew up speaking (English) – this is a good skill to have, because explaining in detail what’s wrong with a car requires a lot of spot on subject-verb agreements if you want to make any kind of sense.

The reason I haven’t gone to Cal before is because his shop is 20 miles away from me in Culver City, and is only open for a couple of hours on Saturday every weekend. I need my car to get home from Cal’s, but I have to leave my car at Cal’s so he can fix it so that it doesn’t break down and prevent me from going to work, where I earn the money I need to pay Cal to fix my car. It’s a punishing cycle from which the only escape is a rental car.

After several weeks of procrastination (which probably didn’t do The Mystery Wagon any favors) I finally sat down today to book a rental car for the entirety of next week, which will hopefully be long enough for Cal to look at my car, explain to me in perfect English what very expensive repairs need to be made, and then make them. 

The results were frustrating.

There are two Hertz Rent-A-Car offices within walking distance of Cal’s shop, both of which are closed on weekends. I guess I can understand why – keeping your business open on weekends would be a surefire way to both better serve your customers and earn money, two things that spell certain death for any company. What this means for me is that I have to go clear to LAX to pick up a rental car after dropping off my only means of transportation with Cal.

It seems like the less car I have, the more driving I have to do. If I just didn’t get my car fixed I’d only have to drive a few miles to the office and back every day, but the second I get rid of my car for a week I’m faced with a unique set of problems which can only be solved by car possession.  

I’ve just now realized that having an old car is a lot like having a dog – it costs a lot of money, requires frequent attention, and under the right circumstances can completely turn your life upside down for a period of time.

On the plus side, The Mystery Wagon doesn’t crap all over the place – but at the same time, I’ve never had a cute girl run up to me in a parking garage and say, “Oh my God, your Subaru is so cute! Can I pet him?”

Truman Capps, for all his bitching, can’t imagine life without The Mystery Wagon.

This Space Left Intentionally Blank

It's one of those situations where I'm under the gun on a couple of writing deadlines and can either write a blog entry that's a shitty waste of time (well, moreso than they usually are, at least) or just hold off until I have the time and energy to make something worth reading. Naturally, I've picked the latter option, partially because I take pride in my work but mostly because it's way easier. 

Something will be here soon; in the meantime you can just head to BuzzFeed to read something edifying like "73 Tree Sloths Who Don't Give A Fuck".

Here In My Car

Sorry ladies - this image is probably a letdown for you after last week.

The Mystery Wagon doesn’t look like much or sound like much, and most of the time it doesn’t smell like much either, although occasionally I do get a burning rubber smell out of the A/C vent that I should probably have checked out. Fortunately, none of that cosmetic stuff means much to me because my car has a kickass set of power locks that I’m thankful for just about every day.

Take this morning, for example. I was on my way to work, waiting a red light by an elementary school, when I spotted a middle aged woman jogging across the street toward my car. She was wearing mismatched athletic gear and looked to be wheezing pretty heavily, most likely trying to catch up on a long-abandoned New Year’s resolution.

My left hand shot out like lightning and hit the LOCK button on the inside panel of my driver’s side door, and with a comforting KER-CHUNK every door in my car was immediately secured shut. Behind my Ray-Bans, my eyes followed her warily as she huffed and puffed past the hood of my car, hung a right, and continued south down the sidewalk past my passenger side door.

That one was a little too close for comfort.

When I first started driving I almost never locked my doors on the road, although a lot of this was because I lived in Salem, Oregon at the time. Salem isn’t especially pedestrian-friendly thanks to the fact that many of the streets have muddy, garbage-strewn shoulders instead of sidewalks; what few pedestrians you do see are usually tooling around in motorized scooters due either to old age or obesity. It’s not a terribly threatening environment.

My small town naïveté was put to bed shortly after my family moved to Portland, when I was giving my then-girlfriend a ride somewhere.

“Woah,” she said as we crossed the bridge into downtown. “You don’t lock your doors when you drive?”

“No,” I said slowly, trying to gauge if this was going to turn into a fight. “Am I supposed to?”

“I always lock my doors when I drive. In high school my driver’s ed teacher said that if you don’t lock your doors, homeless people downtown will jump into your car and force you to drive them wherever they want to go, and if you don’t they’ll, like, pee in your car and stuff.”

If she’d been talking about anything else, I would’ve laughed that notion right the hell off no matter how big of a fight it got me into. But I grew up in the suburbs, and when you grow up in the suburbs the notion of being trapped in a small space with a urinating homeless person is like double 9/11.

So I locked the doors – KER-CHUNK – and have been spontaneously locking them at intersections ever since, all based on one secondhand anecdote from a decidedly unreliable source four years ago. 95% of me knows it’s stupid, but 5% of me knows I’ll feel a lot more stupid when there’s a homeless person pissing in my backseat and demanding that I drive him to Santa Monica.

For the record, I don’t care what race you are, or even if you outwardly appear to be homeless – if you’re a stranger within 10 feet of my car I’m just going to assume you’re a homeless person and will take all the necessary steps to defend The Mystery Wagon from your pee. 

I think the most irrational part of this irrational fear is the idea that a person with no job and no home has some sort of urgent appointment on the other side of town. “I’m delivering the keynote at the National Association of Angry Streetcorner Schizophrenics luncheon in 20 minutes and I don’t have a ride! If I miss this speech it could really mess up my otherwise perfect life! My kingdom for a Subaru!”

Nothing betrays a sheltered upper middle class upbringing more than the assumption that every homeless person is A) crazy and B) absolutely desperate to fuck with you.

Most of my actual encounters with the homeless – with the exception of a dude who offered to blow me on the subway – have been limited to me pretending to not have any money and them muttering “God bless.” Even the guy who wanted to suck my dick was pretty gracious about it when I refused; he certainly didn’t strike me as the sort of criminal mastermind who’d hijack my car by threatening to pee in it.

Honestly, when I’m driving I act crazier than most homeless people probably are. I talk to myself constantly in the car, either practicing standup routines I’ll never do or rehearsing conversations with famous people I’ll never have – and that’s when I’m not singing along with one of the six songs on my iPhone that are in my vocal range. By contrast, the homeless people I see on the sidewalks are usually just standing there waiting for the light.

Maybe it’s my apparent insanity – not my power locks – that have warded off the legions of aggressive homeless people in need of rides over the years. For all I know they could have hilariously out of touch myths about me:

“Woah, you get close to cars at intersections? My driver’s ed teacher said that if you get within ten feet of a car, a dorky college educated Subaru-driving yuppie will pull you inside and force you to ride around with them, listening to their unfunny, derivative standup routines and terrible singing.”

Maybe I don’t need to lock my doors anymore. If I just wear a tinfoil hat when I drive I’m pretty sure nobody would want to get into my car – and maybe people wouldn’t tailgate me as closely, either.

Truman Capps was so well brought up that if a homeless person did jump into his car he’d probably drive the guy to his destination just to be polite.

Dirty Laundry

I did a Google image search for 'fluff and fold' and I got this as one of the first results. Now I REALLY don't trust these places with my laundry.

I restrict my wardrobe to jeans and Mossimo T-shirts for a couple of reasons. The first reason, as many of my female friends have politely reminded me over the years, is that my fashion sense is terrible. Reducing my wardrobe to one type of pants and varying colors of the same T-shirt means that I don’t have to start my day off with a bunch of nerve wracking decisions about which colors match with which.

For the record, President Obama reportedly does the same thing, limiting himself to only blue or black suits, so he can preserve his decision making capacity for the rest of the day. Admittedly, his decisions are usually matters of diplomacy and national security while mine are simply how much blood splatter I can sneak into a trailer in spite of ESRB regulations, but it’s as good an excuse as any to wear basically the same thing every day.

The other reason I keep my wardrobe simple is because even after living on my own for six years, what I don’t know about laundry could fill a warehouse. I know that you’re supposed to put detergent in before the clothes and I know that you’re supposed to separate whites from colors* (which I usually don’t do, because it’s more work), and that’s about it.

*Taken out of context, “I know that you’re supposed to separate whites from colors” is one of those lines that could really make me look bad. Fortunately I’ve written plenty of things that make me look bad in context, so hopefully none of my enemies dig this deep. 

The merits of cold water versus hot water? No idea. Bleach? I’m not sure where in the process it gets used, although I have heard that it’s a bad idea to drink the stuff. Ironing? I know of it. I remember staying home sick as a child and watching Due South with Mom while she ironed clothes. More recently, I remember seeing friends my own age iron clothes and immediately revising my opinion of them.

Hold up. This motherfucker knows how to iron his shit? Clearly I have underestimated him.

The two rickety washers and driers in the basement of my apartment complex only have a couple of different settings, but even those confuse me. The washer, for example, has a WARM water setting, and since that seems to give you the best of both the COLD and HOT settings for the same price, I can’t see why anybody would use anything else. The drier has a NO HEAT option, which I imagine is there if you like your clothes damp and cold but still want to know that they’ve been bounced around for an hour.

Mossimo T-shirts, jeans, and the sheets on my bed can all be washed using my limited breadth of laundry knowledge and come out of the drier with no ill effects. I know that my more delicate wardrobe options – dress shirts, pants with creases in them, my one nice sweater – require different, more intricate treatment that I will no doubt screw up, so I just don’t wear them. I guess I’d prefer to have nice clothes in my closet and not wear them instead of having no nice clothes because I ruined them with my ham-fisted attempts at washing. Either way I’m not dressing nicely, but at least my way I still have nice clothes if I need them.

I know there’s no excuse for me to not learn how to do my own laundry when I’m A) an adult and B) an adult who spends 18 hours a day in front of a machine that can access any information in the world. The truth is that even if I knew how to wash delicate sweaters and iron nice shirts I still wouldn’t do it, because it looks like an uninteresting and time consuming process, and washing and folding the clothes I do wear is already enough of an ordeal, what with the finding enough quarters and the walking up and down stairs.

I was griping about this to my mother on the phone the other night.

“Somebody must’ve stolen some of my shirts or something, because it seems like I’m doing laundry more often than ever now,” I sighed, holding the phone with one hand and sifting through my upended piggy bank for quarters with the other.

“Y’know, if you hate doing laundry so much you could just take your clothes to a fluff and fold.” Mom suggested, probably in hopes of getting me to quit whining.

“So they fold my laundry for me? I like the sound of that. Not sure about ‘fluffing’, though. If that means what I think it means, I don’t want them doing it to my clothes.”

“You give them your dirty laundry and they wash and fold everything for you. It costs money, but you’ve got a job. I’d do the same thing if I lived in an apartment, honestly.”

Since she mentioned it I’ve been watching the pile of dirty clothes in my hamper growing and slowly giving the idea more and more thought. I’m no Vanderbilt, but I make enough doing what I do that I could probably support a mild cocaine habit – a moderate to severe professional laundry habit sounds both cheaper and healthier.

Something about it makes me uncomfortable, though. I just feel like 24 is a little bit young to start throwing money at every domestic task I don’t want to do. I mean, it’s not like doing my laundry is keeping me from doing anything truly important – I’m not exactly curing cancer in my non-working hours. Usually doing my laundry just distracts me from procrastinating about writing.

I’ve always been quite clear about what a lazy piece of shit I am, but hiring someone to do my laundry for me would be a brand new level of sloth. Once I go around that bend, what’s next? If you’re too lazy to do something there’s almost always a person who’ll gladly take your money to do it for you. Would I wind up hiring someone to carry me to the bathroom, or outsourcing this blog to India?

Fortunately, I don’t see myself taking my laundry to a fluff and fold – largely because the nearest one is a few miles away and I’m too lazy to spend more time in traffic than I already do. It looks like the only thing saving me from succumbing to my laziness is more laziness – that is, until I find someone who will drive my laundry to the fluff and fold for me.

Truman Capps will shamelessly pick up any quarter he sees – even one on the floor of a public bathroom – so he can add them to his laundry machine fund.