Creature comforts

Things I absolutely cannot wait to do five months from now:

- Wash and (electric-)dry my laundry at a public laundromat, or, better yet, at my own house!
- Under the rare circumstance that I do send out my laundry, return to the dry cleaning shop at the pre-arranged time and date, with the pre-arranged amount of money, and receive my laundry at said time and date.

While I am happy to hang-dry my laundry in warm, dry months, my clothes sit wet for days (and then develop mold) if I hang-dry them now, despite the spin cycle on the washing machine, despite the fan in my room, despite the air conditioner on the dry setting. Thus, I send out my laundry.

But, as my mom reminded me, it's not like sending out laundry in the US where you zip into the store, hand in your official ticket, pick up your clothes, and are back home in 10 minutes because everything goes according to plan and everything runs efficiently.

I just spent 40 minutes waiting at the laundry shop for my laundry that was sitting there behind the counter the whole time. However, since the 10-year-old boy was running the store and his mother was out picking up more loads of laundry, he was unable to hand over my laundry until she returned. Hence the 40 minute wait.

And hence my frustration.

However, I realize that I'm not frustrated at the laundry situation. The laundry situation is only the newest daily life obstacle that I can turn into a martyr to receive my verbal assaults. The real situation is that, no matter how hard I try, I simply cannot fend for myself while here.

And it's frustrating and upsetting and disheartening that doing laundry - a mindless, independent task that takes exactly 1 hour and 37 minutes in the US (37 minutes to wash, 1 hour to dry) - somehow consumes my entire emotional energy supply for the entire day, and is a process that is dragged out over three days and necessitates several translators, negotiators, and relayers to complete, not to mention the laborious task of pulling the stapled paper tags off of every single individual article of clothing that comes back from the wash.

I miss so much the sense of pride I had in the US over just how independent I was. I could do my laundry on my own. I could take my car to the Subaru dealership, negotiate repairs, trade it in for a rental car, and return a few days later for the reliably-repaired car on my own. I could buy a space heater, if I needed one, simply by looking on the Internet to see where it was sold and how to get to that location, all  without assistance or accompaniment.

Since I am able to do all of those things on my own back home, I can do them on my time-table. But here, I rely on other people to be my translators or negotiators or locaters or chaperones, and all of a sudden, one more person's time-table is added into the equation.

I miss my independence, and I miss feeling competent at the tasks of daily living.