Loads of Laundry

This morning, my basket stacked double high with clothes, I went to the coinless laundromat with a significant portion of my wardrobe. I filled four washers to the max (the advantage over a single washer/dryer- I can wash my clothes all at once), and dried them in three industrial dryers. Doing laundry is always such a surreal experiance. The coinless laundry is in a predominantly poor Mexican strip, anchored by a Food City where I go for fresh tamales and tortillas. If I were so inclined, I might also buy whole sugar cane, prickly pear, and fried pig skins. The laundromat is a mix of Mexicans, various ethnic college students, and assorted strangers. Today I saw a dignified elderly couple and a person dressed all in tan from hiking boots to a floppy sun hat of indeterminable gender.

Nothing too exciting in classes today. In structures, we're finally putting everything togather and learning how to design beams backwards and forwards, so we can calcuate the max load on a set beam, or the minimum size of a beam for a set load.

I've discoverd the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a modern author from the 1930's onward. His short stories are extremely rich and layered, in an almost baroque or gothic feeling, but never becoming loose or unnecessary. He deals a lot with language and semiotics, and his stories all can be considered a mixture of horror, surreal, allegory, and science fiction. He frequently writes about books, reveiews of nonexistant books etc. Intense and bizzare reading. Good stuff.