F*!@# THE LAUNDRY.

I fucking hate my washing machine. And I don't think there's anything Buddha can do to help me.

In saying this I must include that I hate my landlord, who installed the God-forsaken thing. It took him a good six months to get it done, as he promised it to us in February and it did not arrive until late July. As if that wasn't bad enough, I went into my basement the day after (at my own peril, as the pipes of my eighty-year old house were dripping non-pottable water the week before that my roommate's sixteen year old brother, a plumber, diagnosed as "fatal if you were to stay down here all night") to find that this monstrosity it took him half a year to install was, in fact, a total piece of shit.

When your landlord tells you he's going to be installing a washer and dryer in the basement, you might assume he means a "new" washer and dryer, correct? Why would I think otherwise? But what I arrived to was a disappointment at best, a crime at worst. The piece of shit was older than the house itself, if in fact washers were manufactured before 1920- I believe it might be the original model, and it sits in my basement in all its whining, twisting, rickety spendor and makes itself known. And I can't fucking stand it.

I am not spolied by any means, but when I do a load of laundry and come back three hours later to find water stagnated in the bottom and a strange buzzing sound echoing from the machine, I do draw a line. And I just came upstairs from a good twenty minutes spent basically washing my clothes by hand after the thing was finished.

The stupid piece of shit manages to wrap all my clothing around the swirling corkscrew-esque centerpiece, including hooking a tanktop by its straps to the underside of it, which to me seems like it should be impossible. I took the blame the first time, but by now it's become a regular occurance. And it's not okay. It's not okay when I have to spend fifteen minutes disentangling my underwear from the spokes of the washing machine's death trap. When I have to wring t-shirts and enough water pours out to stop the drought in Texas, I can feel my temperature starting to rise. So in the interest of inner peace, I tried this time.

As soon as I opened the machine I had to force my gaze down at Buddha and tried not to get so pissed off. Invariably he smiled out, not the peaceful smile of the skinny (underfed) Buddha, but the jolly and raucous grin of the Laughing Buddha, the only one with enough spirit and charm to have any hope of cracking my furious mood. It didn't work. I was livid. So livid, in fact, that I recorded a video of my anger, which probably won't come out because why would it? But here it is anyway:


And the thing is!! This isn't the first issue with our idiot landlord. He said he was putting in a new porch in August--is it done? Not at all!! Good thing I don't have a three year old, because it would be dead of lead poisoning by now from eating all that peeilng paint. The previous tenants broke all the windows, and they were just replaced last week. And my roommates and I moved in to find all manner of ridiculous shit missing from the house: toilet paper dispensers, even the little bars that hold the condiments in on the door of the refrigerator. I can fix that with a few bucks and bungee cord. I cannot fix this.

Buddha just kept smiling as I fumed over my soaking clothes and shoveled them into the dryer. I was still livid when I went back upstairs, but as I tried to focus on the positive, I started to feel slightly better. A little. Like maybe it's not such a huge deal that the laundry's a pain in the ass? But the feeling was short-lived, as I returned to shove yet another load into the death trap.

No matter how peaceful I become, I'm still not happy to have to deal with this . And my landlord's still a douchebag.