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

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. :-)

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

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