it's hard to tell black from charcoal when the light is dim

[fox]

I had a housemate once who normally wore stockings instead of pantyhose (and really did prefer them, Coupling be damned, because why would she have put up a front with me of all people?) -- an added benefit being that if she got a run in one, she didn't have to ditch the whole pair.  Right?  Makes sense.  But the girl dressed in the dark a lot of mornings, for reasons that were never clear to me, and used to come home from work in the afternoon with tales of how she didn't notice until the big important meeting with some high-up federal muckety-muck that she was wearing one blue stocking and one black stocking.  Or one cream and one leg-colored.  And so on.

And then one time I was folding my laundry in the living room, and I folded a pair of stockings together just as if they were a pair of socks, and my housemate was astonished.  It had never occurred to her that you could keep stockings in the drawer in pairs; why, if she put them in the drawer that way, she'd be sure to have two stockings of the same color every day!  (It wouldn't solve the problem of whether she mistakenly put on navy stockings with a black suit, but that's a separate issue.)

I, for my part, was baffled at the suggestion that a person wouldn't pair up the stockings before putting them in the drawer.  I gathered from the conversation that in fact she didn't match her socks, either.  Am I crazy, that I match up my socks when the laundry is clean, so that what I'm grabbing in the morning is not two socks but rather one pair of socks?  I mean, there are certainly weeks where the clean laundry just lives in the basket, and then I'm grabbing two socks, sure.  But assuming I'm putting the laundry away in the first place -- is it weird of me that I put the socks away in pairs?

This post brought to you by ... a basket full of socks, in black and three shades of grey.  Of course.  :-)

Comments

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

I wear the same socks - Thorlos - in black. They help with foot problems, although they are very expensive. So I don't have that problem, all my socks match.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

I wore two different shoes all day long recently.

And I certainly pair my socks, or I'd wear two different socks about 80% of the time...

[lexin.livejournal.com]

If you're nuts then I am, too. I always match up socks in pairs before putting them away - and keep any oddsies to one side so that they don't get mixed up with the pairs.

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

I'm with you--pairing up socks is normal, except for those times when the laundry never quite gets put away before it's time to do it again.

[kmg-365.livejournal.com]

My wife and I always pair our socks when we're folding the laundry.

Great timing on this post: I just noticed that the black socks I am wearing today are actually navy. Curse you, bad closet lighting!

[reginagiraffe]

Not only do I pair my socks but I organize them by color in my drawer. I would never wear black socks instead of blue by mistake, even in the dark, because the blue socks live in a different place than the black socks do.

[wishwords.livejournal.com]

You aren't crazy at all.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

you're not crazy! i pair up my socks and then sort them by type in the drawer -- athletic socks, work socks -- and any singletons go in a box, and every couple of weeks i look through the box and find any pairs that have been reunited therein.

[mearagrrl.livejournal.com]

I try to pair my socks. Sometimes they end up being dumped on the bed because I need the basket to do more laundry and I never put the clean laundry away. But...

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

I *never* pair mine.

I never seem to throw out the single socks, either. I suppose I keep hoping the missing one will reappear.

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

I always pair my socks. In fact, I have a ritual of sock-pairing: I store up all the clean socks for a while, then I sort through and pair massive numbers of socks all at once. My father taught me to do this, and it used to be incredibly satisfying: order! From chaos! One moment, hundreds of random socks - next moment, neat little pairs!

And then we got a dog. Who loves socks. And stores them in her mouth, and is never really happy until she's got a sock to carry around.

Now, yeah, I still do the store-up-the-clean-socks thing, but I know that when it's sorting time, I will be lucky to find mates for 15% of the socks in the pile; the rest probably have mates, but the dog carried them somewhere, and I won't find them for a few weeks or months yet. So we have several million socks (an exaggeration, but NOT MUCH OF ONE), so that we can be reasonably sure of having just one pair of socks when we need one.