So This Might Be A Book

On plungers

I'm not particularly heavy. Maybe 140 pounds and 6'0. Reading that does make me think I need to lose some weight but not part of the story. I'll start with my mother. Who is a nice, but sometimes controlling and irrational person. Granted this is coming from a teenager and if we stopped to think about it I seriously doubt half of the complaints teenagers have about their parents are actually valid complaints and are more of an angst thing.

My mother somehow managed to trip and fall while I was putting up a mini blind and she was watching. It was a pretty long fall and the amount of times she could have regained balance probably was a bit of a miracle. Regardless she never did regain it, just plopped onto the floor. Spoiler alert, she broke her wrist which makes the fact that she didn't cry either terrifying or amazing. After confirming she was in pain and not a cyborg she stood up and walked to a chair and sat down in it and pulled a blanket over herself with the other hand.

This chair is where she would spend much of the next three weeks. Which starts adult boot camp for me. The place where men who don't have many skills outside of grilling, killing bugs, and opening car hoods and staring at the intricate puzzle while they realize they know nothing, turn into competent housewives able to fold towels within the same amount of time it takes to turn a shirt inside out. Now I assume most male humans have a bit more of the manliness gene than I do. See I don't have a lack of testosterone, I actually have one of the more matured bodies out of my male friends and have an Adam's apple that could mortally wound someone. That being said I act like a flamboyantly gay man, which most assume isn't an act, but that is a chapter for another time.

So I had to learn the science of one rinse one dry and it was rather confusing. Separating my back porch from the rest of the house is a sliding glass door, which I have only ran into three times, not particularly interesting. The porch has a doorway on the left wall that leads to the laundry room. To get to the laundry room I have to use this sliding glass door, the only problem is that it doesn't open like normal sliding glass doors. It will move back a bit then just stop as if a gnome who has the pecs of a god is using it as his part of his strength day workout.

My mother's tactic for opening the door and outdoing the gnome is to use one hand to push it up off the track while using the other to pull it open. As much as I despise admitting my mother posses knowledge surpassing basic addition and subtraction, this proved to be the best method. That or the gnome just happened to be having a protein bar break where he will tweet about the insane number of reps he did with all the pencils magically disappearing from my backpack, and will then send random pictures of his genitals to all females on his contact list.

Now that you feel no sympathy for the douchetastic gnome who makes my life even more difficult let us move on to actually putting the clothes in the washer. Opening the lid, generally easy. Remembering the order of which to put a full cap of detergent, turn on water, which involves a complex system of turning the dial to a certain black line and screwing around until you do finally understand that you know nothing, back to lists, put in clothes then a half a cap of detergent, and finally closing the lid. Very difficult for my feeble male brain.

Only that isn't it, the water stops but it doesn't begin to actually wash. How do you propose we fix this problem? Mess around with the dials? No silly, you beat the top of it senseless until it clicks into working again and proceeds to make washing machine noises that I will leave up to your imagination. Now there is no scientific basis for how this works because after I tried hitting it and mom yelled at me for beating it too hard, I'll leave the masturbation jokes up to you as well, she managed to come over and hit it a few times and then it just clicked into life. Maybe the washing machine fears the fact that my mom could be a cyborg who is simply waiting for me to move out to finally expose the cannon arm she has kept hidden for the fifteen years of my life, or just my mother being stronger than me. It worked, which infuriated me.