Doing laundry after college

Dear Catharsis,

Doing laundry after college is easily the single most significant detail of life that is taken for granted while in college. Right up to the day of graduation, I always had relatively easy access to doing laundry, be it in my parents house, my aunt's house or a short walk downstairs and across the courtyard to the laundry room. Everyone bitched and moaned about how expensive it was to do laundry, but looking back I guess we were paying for the convenience.

After college, doing laundry is the pinnacle of being alone. There is nothing more depressing, more lonesome that getting up packing up your clothes trudging down the street--which in my case is about a fifteen minute walk--and do laundry next to people whose silence speaks volumes about how they don't want to be where they are, do not want to speak to you unless its to find out if the machine next to you is vacant, and you pretty much feel the same way.

Doing laundry is nothing like going shopping, which I have been told, is the best place to meet someone. The shopping cart can be very telling about a person's lifestyle and personality. A laundry basket can be just as revealing but you don't really want to know what it has to show you.

Tomorrow is my first official day in Philadelphia completely on my own, as the one contact (read: friend--I am not that cold hearted) will be returning to college where he can do laundry from the confines of the secluded Guilford campus. He has shown me a great deal of Philly and I am excited to branch out and meet new people. But at the same time, I am growing weary of it. It seems ever since high school I have had to make a new batch of friends every other year or so and to be quite honest I am tired of doing it. I miss my friends from San Francisco, I miss my friends from Greensboro, I miss my girlfriend, who is working in South Korea and seems to have had no trouble making friends with people who she can go out and have a drink with or go on adventures with. I am not bitter about that at all, I am very happy for her, but at the same time I have only met people in passing and the people I could hang out with work for me and I am forced to respect the distance of work and out of work relationships. At least I have the Exchequer but even she in all of her manic, kitten-intense energy can drive me crazy. But I am still happy to have her.

Oh well, let's see what tomorrow brings, and let's see how much I enjoy the one thing I have asked for my entire life...To be completely alone.