Hangers
Hangers: Those plastic white things that contribute to the instructional integrity of ocean trash heaps but also hold up my clothes. On the record I’m very against hangers but my closeted truth: I secretly cast my ballot for hangers in the last election.
The most valuable resource in the world is hangers in the fall, right around when those young Huskies migrate back to the U-District. If anyone gots any, I’ll trade you my kidney. Why are they so impossible to find? First we tried Target, then we tried Walmart, then we tried Goodwill, then we tried Home Depot, then we tried Home Goods, then we tried Winco, then we gave up and went to Chick-Fil-A. The hunt stretched over the flips of two calendar pages.
Essentially we were conquistadors looking for gold. The natives of each aisle handed us a map that pointed to the x-marked shelf, and we’d landfall our galleon shoppingcarts only to curse the empty treasure sites which had been excavated weeks before our arrival. Blast those migrating college students and their need to check boxes off of a first-year prep checklist. If we’re being honest, college students don’t need more hangers; they need more laundry baskets or floor space. Our nation’s precious resources should be preserved for those that actually need them. Like me. Because we all know that those out there fighting the greatest struggle are mid-20, white males with well-paying jobs*.
*Editor's Note: My ultimate goal for the blog is one day the blog will be so popular that I’ll be quoted out of context causing the blog to be canceled. You know you’ve made it when you’ve been cancelled. To speed this process along I’m making an effort to point out those sentences beforehand; in addition to the last sentence in the above paragraph, my Starcraft piece had another good one in the first paragraph.
For the duration of the time that we’ve lived in our new apartment we’ve forgone the vital triangles. Instead of sending my t-shirts to the gallows to hang I’ve had to sacrifice them on laundry pyramids. Dumb imagery aside, I’ve got 99 problems and haphazard piles of shirts are numbers 37 through 57.
Before the move we had an overabundance of hangers so our thinking fell along the lines of: “You have a lot of hangers; I have a lot of hangers; let’s donate some.” In our heads the math worked out, but in reality, neither one of us had counted our t-shirts. In our defense we aren’t bad at math we just hadn’t bothered to do it. Also part of the problem snuck out of forgotten boxes from deep inside storage. We hadn’t accounted for all the t-shirts we never wore but obviously needed to keep. “No, I haven’t worn this t-shirt in ten years but yes, I was on the high-school cross country team for four years, and these shirts are the only proof.”
Sadly, this story doesn’t have a resolution. We’re still without hangers. Granted we have some but not enough to feed the troops. The minority part of the t-shirt army have bunkered on the floor, vainly waiting for rescue from the hanger support cavalry. I haven’t the heart to tell them that no one is coming to save them - at least for the foreseeable semester.
