The Mystery Thong

Yesterday, despite my best attempts to only leave the couch for food or bathroom breaks, I was forced off the couch in order to do laundry. Laundry is never a particularly exciting chore, but it is made less fun by having to carry a heavy basket along with detergent and quarters down narrow windy stairs (where I have hurt myself several times) from my second floor apartment to the basement. I was motivated by the fact that Michael was dangerously low on clean clothes, and I needed a few things washed myself. I managed to make it up and down the stairs without sustaining any injury. My usual modus operandi is to wash and dry everything, lug it back up the stairs, then leave it sitting in the laundry basket until shortly before bed, when I realize that if I don't hang up my clothes, they will be wrinkled and I'll have to iron them in the morning. This is a huge deterrent for me, as my ironing board is one of those little tiny ones that I had as a college student living in the dorm, and have unfortunately regressed to again. (Aren't I supposed to get more grown up things as I get older?) Which normally isn't so terrible if you have a table to put the ironing board on, but the table that was in the second bedroom, on which the computer used to reside and which I used to put the ironing board on, has been sold. Therefore, ironing is much more difficult than it was only days ago. Plus, I don't leave myself much extra time in the mornings for silly things like ironing. So, as I was folding or hanging our clothes I happened upon something that did not belong.

It was a thong.

A black cotton Victoria's Secret thong.

And it's not mine.

I don't own a black cotton Victoria's Secret thong. I do own several thongs, but the ones that I wear the most are from JC Penney. (Michael once made fun of my Supergirl one, so we went to Penney's and bought some nicer ones on sale. Is that an overshare?) I'm not really sure what to do about this mystery thong. I assume it's clean. I'm just not sure how it got mixed up with my laundry. I mean, the only normal explanation is that it was in one of the machines I used and just got mixed up with my stuff. But, you see, I looked in the machines before I used them. I always do. Maybe it was kind of stuck under the agitator in the washer. It's not very well lit in the laundry area, and the agitator's black, the underwear's black...perhaps. Or, maybe someone threw them in one of my machines after my stuff was in it. Why? I don't know. But stranger things have happened. There was an underwear bandit at ACU in the laundry room of the University Park Apartments where I lived my junior year. I'd heard of several girls getting their underwear stolen out of their dryers. Then, one day, I went down and all but a couple pairs of white cotton panties were gone. I was very upset, because whoever it was stole almost all of my underwear. Fortunately, I had a few that weren't in the wash, but I had to go to the store and buy replacements. At the time, I had enough underwear to easily last two or three weeks, and this was essential to my laundry schedule. While I can think of no reason why someone would put their underwear into my laundry intentionally, as I've said, stranger things have happened. So, the mystery thong is languishing in a corner of the front hallway by the closet. When I realized it wasn't mine, I kind of flung it away in disgust, then later kicked it into the corner.

Eeeww...I touched a stranger's thong.

That's gross.

And it touched my clothes.

It almost made me want to go wash them all again. But it was late and I needed to go to bed, plus I didn't have enough quarters to do all the laundry again. So, I just tell myself that the thong must've been clean if it came out with my laundry and that makes me feel a bit better. Still...in some countries they call thongs floss...you get the idea. I think I might just go take it back down to the laundry room and leave it there. Maybe someone will realize they're missing a thong and then go looking for it. I just hope they wash it before they wear it again. The corner of the hallway isn't terribly clean.