laundry

this is an issue i have been grappling with - i wonder if laundrical (?) norms still apply now that i'm practically out of society. i've thought a while before posting this, but ah come on, it's not as if i'm going to be meeting any of you guys anyway.

judge all you want - but you will realise by the end of the post that i make sense.

perhaps it would be most helpful to first ask: why do we do laundry?

the prima facie answer is simple - to have clean clothes. (duh has lockdown dumbed your senses?)

now i could launch into a full-scale debate of whether doing laundry really does give you clean clothes, or that the difference pre- and post-laundry is minimal, but that would turn a talkcocksummit post into a thesis, so let's scrap this for now.

if i wanted to do a thesis, i should be doing my real thesis anyway :/

let's do it shanmugam style and set up a false dichotomy. if you do your laundry, you wear clean clothes. if you don't, you wear dirty clothes.

so what if you wear dirty clothes? dirt never truly killed anyone, if we were to define dirt as the dust particles that settle in your room on a daily basis.

***COVID IS NOT CLASSIFIED AS DIRT.***

then detractors would argue, but dirt doesn't have to kill for it to be wrong. it is unhygienic and could be unhealthy for your skin if you wear dirty clothes.

this could be controversial but surely hygiene is only an issue when normal society applies?

let's put it this way. i did know of some pretty dirty people back in school but i didn't bother lecturing them on the finer points on how body odour turns people away, or could cause skin problems.

oh no boy. i just avoid them like the plague. i go to school on the first day to book my seat next to people who do not dig their noses in class.

i might have digressed a little. my point is, i am now one of those "dirty" people but everyone is already avoiding everyone. therefore i conclude that the old rules don't apply.

the next-level moralist could be asking an even deeper question: such as, should you not be doing the "right thing" even when nobody is looking?

like would you jaywalk across the road when it's 3am?

for the record, i would. (i even do it when it's 3pm, as long it's not in front of an elderly german lady with children nearby.)

and that's precisely why i cannot apologise for not doing any laundry this month.