"Are you washing clothes for your girlfriend, too?"

"You wear pink?" was the second question out of the fifteen year-old's mouth once I told her that no, everything she'd been watching in the dryer was mine. We chatted a little bit about whether or not we like to paint our toes or our fingers more, how it was so much hotter inside than out, and by that time, my laundry was folded, and I was on my way.

Sometimes I just don't get it. Pink underwear tumbling around in the window of my dryer at the laundromat is somehow more transgressive when it's pressed up against the glass door than it is adorning my (adorable) little butt. Unfortunately, they're more visible on laundry day than any other day of the week. Maybe I should just stop wearing pants?

While this was certainly the friendliest interaction I had as the only white girl in the neighborhood laundromat, I still feel as though have to pay tribute to everything wrapped up in the questions my new friend was asking. Compulsory gender conformity. Compulsory heterosexuality. Blah blah blah. I'd like to read her question at least a little bit optimistically, though, that she was open to a broader range of masculinized identities, that it would not be so unreasonable for someone who identified as a straight boy to be the one who does the laundry. Or perhaps that I had already emasculated myself by showing off my knickers to the rest of the neighborhood, and she was trying to help me save some scrap of manhood by allowing them to be my invisible girlfriend's underpants.

But on this sleepy Sunday, my underwear is blue, though this pair did come from the women's section. Go figure.