Wash Me

Went to the 10th Street Laundromat this weekend. I am ambivalent about doing laundry at the laundromat. On the one hand, it's stressful because you never know if there will be enough w/d available. On the other hand, it provides a great feeling of accomplishment. Look, a drawer full of clean underwear! Yeah!! However, I don't think I'll go to 10th St. anymore. For one thing, it's full of narrow cramped corridors and it's always jammed. For another, the washing machines resist swallowing quarters, so you have to stand there feeding and re-feeding them into the slot over and over again, hoping one will catch. I seriously stood at each machine for maybe 5 minutes each coaxing the quarters to go in. I felt like an idiot, and there were lots of people around watching me struggle with this. A Mexican dude came up to me and said, You need some help? I said, No, just--leave me alone, please. He walked away and I felt kind of like a jerk, but also, what was he going to do? Kick the machine? Use his magic, heavier quarters? I think I am starting to become mean. I don't know when this happened, but I seem to have less tolerance lately for invasiveness, like people bumping up against you on the subway or standing too close in line at Target or whatever.

Tried to work on my next assignment for screenwriting class--5 to 10 pages of an arresting opening scene. It's hard because it can center around anything, anything, anything; even crazy stuff like an alien space invasion, a time traveling dwarf, a hockey mom turned VP. I thought about writing a story about a nurse who steals a baby but couldn't figure out what would happen after that or how she might get away with it. Instead, I ended up with this cliched ro-co idea about a female rivalry. Oh, well, oh, well.