Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Now I know how a surgeon feels

Okay. Sunday night, in a trade off with SockMama, I agreed to iron her shirt in exchange for her doing the dishes. That was great for me - I hate the dishes almost as much as I hate reality TV. Almost.

But here's the thing. In my vast ironing background, I've only experienced ironing my stuff. Needless to say, I'm a pro at ironing slacks and dress shirts. Seriously, if there were an ironing Olympics, I would probably get to a medal round. I doubt I would get the Gold, though - that honor would most likely be bestowed on a guy from SoHo who lives above the Versace store.

Anyhow. I plug in the iron and fire it up (Heat Level: 5 - this is cotton we're talking about). As it's heating up, I take a good look at my adversary: It's a colorful striped shirt with a pronounced collar and oh-so-cutely designed cuffs that are folded back. And stitched. A considerable opponent, to be sure.

The iron clicks and I (gently) lay the shirt down on the board. But there's a problem. It seems that, for whatever reason, women's clothes have more stitch lines than men's clothes. So while my dress shirt folds easly on its various lines, this shirt wouldn't---instead of forming a nice, simple crease at the line, there are TWO stitch lines that, no matter what angle of approach I took, I couldn't get the area pressed. I would fold one side and it would fuck up the other side. The definition of a vicious cycle.

20 minutes later, I'm still grappling with my new foe. No amount of folding, halving, shaping, smoothing, or altering helped; the shirt was becoming even more wrinkled by the minute. I decided to take a different approach.

By buttoning the shirt, I was able to flank the double stitching sides and effectievely iron out many of the wrinkles. Alas, the area in between the doublt stitching remained untouchable - it was the cotton Don Corleone. And I happened to be playing the hapless mortician who's daughter got mugged by some thugs in the begining of the movie.

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