Why It's Hard to Do Laundry and Why I'm Glad to Be in New York by Way of Florida

I've been so busy that I haven't had time to do laundry.

I didn't realize that when you don't have your own washer and dryer, washing your clothes takes up at least two hours of your life - you have to take them to the laundromat and sit there waiting for them so they don't get stolen. Well, I've been busy pretty much from 10-10 the past few days, and the laundromat is only open 7:00 am to 11:30 pm.

I've run out of jeans, work shirts, socks, work pants ... I've been wearing everything dirty. So finally, once my laundry bag weighed more than 20 pounds, to suck it up and drop off my laundry for someone else to wash. Dropped it off at the laundromat at 8:15 am, picked it up at 10:30 pm. Pretty convenient actually, since I don't have to lose two hours of my life, or buy detergent, or fold anything. (Though it was a little complicated since the employees there don't really speak English. I was trying to ask a question last night and other customers had to jump in and translate.) Everything is nice and wrinkle-free, though it does smell a little funny.

I squeezed in a voice lesson at 9 am today. Feel like I'm making some progress -- enough that I want to go back and re-record everything that I've ever done. It's funny that I never realized exactly how to apply what I learned in classical lessons to my pop singing, but since I've already learned those techniques, I can make rapid progress once my new teacher points it out to me. I'm really excited about where things are going.

At UFO today, everyone was gone. My boss's wife just had a baby, the tour marketing lady I work with works from home on Mondays, the president and another top guy went to a conference in Toronto, and most of the other employees work elsewhere on Monday. The office housed only three male interns, a secretary, a retail/distributor lady, and me. The other interns had no work, so I made them help me with mine.

At Starbucks, I've picked up on everything so fast the other employees keep asking if I've worked at Starbucks before. Nope. I don't know, everything's just simple and really similar to my work at Tropical Smoothie. But I've noticed a huge difference in my work and the work of all the New Yorkers -- I'm not rude to the customers.

Being friendly to customers puts me in a really good mood, but the other employees get so frustrated with them. They yell things like, "C'mon people, pay attention when drinks are being called," or angrily defend their behavior to the customers. Acting like that is just completely foreign to me.

Maybe it's because I'm from *gasp* the South.