they say that one should never air their dirty linen in public. but for today, i'm going to go against this age old adage and reveal to you a family secret. a secret so deep and dark and stained that no Indonesian maid would ever want to be employed under the Zhang family to do their dirty deeds (and linen). the revelation in question?

The Teo Children have never completely done their own laundry at home before.
(insert dramatic horror theme)

i know i know. at this point you're thinking like 'Chay..... and i thought there was going to be incest in this post. I'm not reading anymore'. let me just try to appeal to you to stay a while my dear reader. come, take off your clothes (including your knickers). they need a good washing. after all, i have just accomplished what i thought was the impossible - doing the laundry from the separation of lights and darks all the way to the folding and keeping them in their respective drawers. so grab a chair, take a seat and let me start up the washing machine.

to begin with, the Teo children have always been part of the laundry process. though it's mainly towards the end where we have no choice but to keep the folded clothes in the respective cabinets. but it's still being part of the process that counts, isn't it? frankly speaking though, if given the choice i would leave the whole thing to a domestic help. yes, i'm that lazy when it comes to housekeeping. regardless, sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do when there's no one else around to do it.

with the parents gone for their little Zen time with Jesus, most of the housework seems to fall on my shoulders. the brother, being the heterosexual person that he is, doesn't even lift a finger to even touch the vacuum cleaner or do the dishes. it's times like these that i'm thankful for having the gay genes, because it would seem that the pinker sex comes fully equipped with a set of skills that would make Martha and her apprentices proud.

come to think of it though, the only experience i've had with washing machines and laundry would be back in the days of Brunei. we had communal toilets that came attached with two washing machines and two dryers. nothing fanciful, just simple washing machines and dryers that were constantly overworked to the point that they threatened to break down every few months by being extra noisy with their work. doing the laundry in Brunei however, was very easy. since every single garment smelt like crap and was generally black, brown, green or gray, everyone would just dump lights and darks into the communal washing machine, pour a great dollop of detergent and put it to spin for forty minutes.

the communal dryer was the tricky bit. a typical spin in the dryer would take ninety minutes. and since everyone was just too lazy to sun their clothes, the dryer was always in use. there would always be some asshole who would remove everyone's clothes at the seventh minute and replace it with his own. this basically resulted in a constant battle for the use of the dryer. it got so bad that someone actually removed the knob which started the dryer and kept it for himself. thank goodness the guy who removed it was from my department.

anyways, back to the present. with the laundry basket filled to the brim with armpit stains, skidmarks and cumstains awaiting eradication, it was thus that i decided to attempt the laundry process with that Bruneian anticipation. the mother being the domestic goddess that she is, wrote down detailed instructions on how to use the washing machine. that helped with about 40% of the job. it was the separation of the lights and the darks that really killed it though. what do those people mean when they say 'light'? is hot pink considered a dark color? what about clothes with more than one color on it like stripes? the gay mind was working overtime to process the entire spectrum of colors.

this was something that required the wisdom of a cigarette. so i lit up, and sat down on the kitchen stool to think. true enough, like a mentos mint, i managed to come up with a relatively fool-proof law that my gay mentality could comprehend. any color that was considered boring to me went to the darks. while all the colors that represent gaiety was welcome into the open arms of the lights. i felt an immense sense of accomplishment as i dumped all the dark into the washing machine for the ninety minute wash.

nobody warned me about the perils of hanging clothes on the indoor wooden poles though. the normal regime would be to hang the clothes on wooden poles which were balanced by hooks drilled into the ceiling. the only way to get these poles down would be the use of another wooden pole with a hook. it's difficult to explain actually. what i can explain though is that i've suffered a lot of hits from falling poles that slipped out of the hooks. one of them even hit my eye. all i can say is that i'm insured and in the event of death of disability, there's money to be gained.

so i'm done with the darks. but what about the whites? after all the poles dropping from the ceiling, i was a bit fazed from hanging up them wet clothes. so i did it the lazyman's way - the dryer. little did i know that dumping super wet clothes in the dryer is the olfactory equivalent of the aging of bleu cheese. ninety minutes of hot dryer action only did preserve that musky smell of dirty laundry water and used detergent. believe me, it was gross.

left with no choice, i still had to hang the whites in the end. so there i was, trying to pick out the clothes that were entirely dry so that i didn't have to hang everything up. i did this process of elimination by smelling the entire batch of whites, judging based on funky smells and general dampness. well here's the catch, the mother has a lot of white undergarments. so whoever was watching from their kitchen window at the opposite block must have got quite a sight. a boxer-brief-clad young man inhaling the scent of his mother's brassier and panties.

and the biggest challenge of all - how in the world do you fold a brassier neatly so that it will fit into the drawers? i was afraid of damaging the padded bras because i have seen the price tag attached to bras and believe me once again, i could smoke five packs of cigarettes with each breast support garment that a woman wears. so i tucked the cups and straps neatly beneath each other and placed everything nicely on the parent's bed.

thus it is with a boastful voice that i declare myself to be a relative novice at the processing of laundry. it is the first time. but i'm quite sure it won't be the last. because your clothes are now done with washing. but i'm too lazy to hang it up to dry. so why don't we dump them clothes in the dryer and get down to the more important things.

like the washing of your underparts.

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