Wednesday, during which nothing fucking works.

Laundry was long overdue today, so I hauled my bags of it to the laundrette in the campus square. The loading/detergent process was difficult enough to do properly even with its written instructions. But the real topper was that the central pay slot started eating my coins-- not processing them, not regurgitating them in the change return, but simply absorbing them. I began to warn other unwary patrons that the thing was ferkakt (sp?) and got pen and paper from the Union Food Outlet next door and posted a sign. Calling the repair number listed on the pay slot proved little help; the guy hesitated and informed me with some reluctance that "we won't get to that for awhile." As I type this I'm sitting in my dorm room with three loads of wet laundry stretched and sprawled in every possible advantageous open space, hoping they'll be dry by morning. Then there's a completely unwashed load that I was about to put in-- and it was then that the slot stopped functioning properly

To add insult to injury, technology is failing me also. My little portable iPod speakers I received for high school graduation, having first lost the ability to charge an iPod, and then to play music from an iPod, are now hardly able to be used simply as auxilliary computer speakers. There's a lot of line hum/white noise going on whenever sound is put through them. Oh well... they lasted almost three years. Time to invest in new ones.

Further adding salt to wound is the slow death of my external hard drive. I love it-- it's an elegant brick that's quite portable and in over three years of owning it I've only filled up 60 of it's 250-gigabyte storage capacity. But now, whenever I open an item from it (usually meaning that I attempt to play a song from iTunes), the damn thing whirs and clanks for a good while "as if there were little men banging mallets inside" as my friend Max has said. It will ten whir down, and repeat the two-step process. Eventually the song will play or the file will be able to be opened, but ultimately the wait time is getting worse. I hope these things don't run too much...I NEED one in order to continue music and music management/playback while abroad. There's simply no room on my laptop's hard drive to hold my music collection.

One spot of good news: about to hit the gym at 3:30.