Machines: both laundry and vending.

Today I wasted the best handwriting of my life on the word “laundry.”

Usually my handwriting is terrible, with r-looking n’s and overly upright f’s and b’s. But today when I casually decided to make a list on the back of a window envelope with the company logo emblazoned on it, I spontaneously achieved flawlessly casual cursive.

And I am pissed (understandably, I warrant). If I had this one beautiful handwriting sample deep within the bowels of my fingers, why would I waste it on the word ‘laundry’? In my glee I tried to immediately continue my list with hopes to achieve the same penned majesty, but every other item came out in my typically spacey writing. I’m certain it’s gone forever.

Speaking of things that anger me unreasonably, I’m going to dabble in a little economic theory for a moment. I’ve always been one for chaffing my nose on the proverbial grindstone, and so I go to work everyday and make some small packet of monies. And with this money I buy goods and gas and lament like everyone else that prices are rising and especially that the job market is shitty, given my particular circumstance of job-searching.

“Yes,” I think to myself as I cruise along in my lumbering vehicle, listening to every moronic radio commercial blaring the word CRISIS into my ear. “Gas is hideously expensive.”

I absorb this daily and reaching back into the recesses of my brain I remind myself of what inflation means, and what a widget is, and how that the invisible hand is not just another creepy Kevin Bacon movie.

And yet, when I went yesterday to the vending machine at my work place to buy a Milky Way, I was enraged to find that it cost 90 cents. Vending machine inflation is the worst of all. I don’t want to hear any more pansies whining about gas prices; we should just thank our lucky stars that our cars don’t run on delightful caramel.

I would like to say that paying ninety cents for a Milky Way is the worst vending machine experience that I’ve ever had, but unfortunately I have a long history of ugly vending machine encounters. I’m thinking specifically of an instance in during last spring quarter when I was refused my Skittles by a vending machine in a crowded section of Wellman hall. [Characteristic comment on spell checking: Skittles is a word? Really?] I decided to forgo the generally futile and noisy attack on said vending machine, and consoled myself by muttering profanities and slinking away into a nearby lecture hall.

A few minutes later I was seated in the lecture and reading the newspaper (I miss you, free news-print and terrible comics), when a girl silently approached me with a package of Skittles held in front of her. In confusion, I reached out my hand to receive them, wondering frantically if I should have any idea who this chick was. And here is the most mysterious bit of all: after handing me the Skittles, she didn’t offer any explanation or even giggle nervously as I would have, but walked straight back out the door. Just like a guardian angel of artificial fruit flavoring.

That, my friends, is a truly freakish vending machine experience.
As a final point: I’ve been working my way through A Passage to India, (motivated by my love for A Room with a View) and feel a great suspense. It has morphed into one of those court-dramas that hinges on racism, and I always find those sorts of plots most distressing. A similar weakness hinders my reading of slave narratives and led to my refusal of all war tales and holocaust memoirs for cheeky comedies of manners.