White Shirts (Archive from October 9, 2003)

White shirts make me very happy but they are only good for one thing: spilling coffee on. I have a crisp new white shirt on. I am so pleased with it. It will never look this good again. After today it will be wrinkled and discolored. I think white shirts should be established as a disposable item and they should be sold in packs of 20 for a very low price. No manner of washing or ironing will ever make it as wonderfully crisp and impressive-looking as it is right now. And the next time I try it on to wear to work I will be flooded with disappointment when I pull it out to find it creased and maybe even shrunk in the washer as a direct result of the fact that instead of letting my mother teach me housekeeping skills like laundry back when I lived with her, I spent my teenage years wandering around humming Violent Femmes songs, trying to write like Sylvia Plath and failing to notice the multitude of ink stains that perputually marred by hands and face. And failing to learn how to do laundry or iron a white shirt properly.