I’m tired of laundry baskets. Laundry baskets are the very definition of “vicious circle”. At first, you just throw in a couple items, and everything’s peachy. Not a care in the world. Don’t give it a thought. But before you know it, you’ve got five, ten, twenty different items in there, a massive tangle of jeans and undies, and at this point things start to go downhill real quick. Now you’re spending 20 minutes in front of the closet every morning, floundering through a selection of hideous shirts, most of which are older than a kindergartener, trying to find a single thing you want to wear. Socks that match your outfit? Ha! You’re just lucky if you aren’t wearing snowmen on one foot and jack-o-lanterns on the other. At some point you trudge off to work in neon purple pants and an ugly Christmas sweater and decide that you’ve had it – you’re doing laundry tonight, dad gum it! Determined, you finally hoist the overflowing basket onto your hip…72 hours later. You throw out your back. You cry. You curse the laundry, which is now scattered across the floor. On hands and knees you slowly gather each piece, then inch by laborious inch, you drag it into the laundry room. (That is, of course, only if you are privileged enough to have a washer and dryer in your home – otherwise you gotta haul that sucker to the laundromat, and that’s a whole other story.) You finally get to the laundry room and say a quick prayer. Hey, who knows, maybe this time you actually did buy a magical bottomless bottle of laundry detergent. But it appears God is off comforting the downtrodden or something silly like that. So you shake that bottle like there’s no tomorrow and – plink! plink! – hope the water gets bubbly. Time to sort. You haven’t questioned yourself this much since your freshman year Philosophy 101 final. How dark is dark? How light is light? And “Like colors only”, huh? Your favorite chartreuse shirt might as well have been hand-dyed by a sherpa using the pigment of a Siberian beetle. There’s nothing in that color family anywhere in North America, let alone in your miserable laundry basket. Take this opportunity to berate yourself for buying it, along with that half blood-red/half snow-white monstrosity – you know that’s not gonna survive a dip into the murky waters of the washing machine abyss, no matter what those Shout Color-Catcher sheets claim. And heaven forbid you’ve invested in a piece that is dry-clean-only, or worse yet, hand-wash-only. It’s going straight back in the basket, never again to see the light of day. Then you start checking pants pockets, hoping to stumble across a forgotten $20 bill. No such luck, but if you’d like you can dub yourself the Warren Buffett of lint, chewing gum and used kleenexes. At long last, the clothes actually make their way into the washing machine and you hobble off for a nap. If the planets are in alignment, your machine will neither cause the entire house to vibrate nor leak all over your new carpet. Don’t hold your breath. Hopefully you’re dogged enough to return the same day. If not, your clothes will have soured and you’ll need to wash them again. Try not to repeat this process more than twice in a row, if you can manage it, because it gets depressing faster than you might think. If you’re finicky, you’ll hang the nicer clothes to let them dry gently. Now instead of shrinking or melting in the dryer, they’ll be lumpy around the shoulders and loose in the arms. Nice try though. You toss everything else in the kiln dryer and try not to hyperventilate at the thought of the risk involved. You spend an hour doing yoga. In the buff. Inevitably, when you return, the clothes are either sopping wet or fried to a crisp. If you’re as lucky as I am, they’ll also be covered in rust and jammed irretrievably into a crack in the internal workings of the machine. If you’re luckier yet, you’ll have burnt the house down. If necessary, you shove the clothes back in the dryer, angrily jab the start button, and spend an hour fuming. In the buff. At long long long last, your clothes are dry, or at least you’ve given up on them ever being dry. This is where that satanic object, the laundry basket, comes back into play. You dump the clothes into it and dejectedly use one toe to scoot it into the bedroom. Now you have a choice: either abandon your pathetic pile of wrinkled laundry at this critical juncture and resign yourself to maniacally ransacking the basket every morning for the rest of your life, or do your duty like a good American by whipping out the ironing board and getting down to business with the folding, hanging and putting away. In the end, all is vanity and grasping for the wind. For what will you be doing two weeks from now, you sad, sorry excuse for a human being? That’s right. You’ll be doing the laundry. Again. So just try and tell me you are neutral on the subject of laundry baskets. I’ll believe it when a week goes by that I don’t see you wearing the same pair of pants four days in a row. 
