She's a highly specialized key component of operational unity

So it's that time of year to start filing the laundry again. There are many little signals of this: there's that unmistakable scent in the air, the lengthening of days, the Nutria Day giant rodents peeking out of their efficiency apartments, people unafraid of spoilers peeking underneath the calendar to see what day it is. Actually most people just use the last, since it's hard to take time off work to look at giant rodents, particularly if you've been looked at skeptically since the ``President's Day Ant'' fiasco. You might end up having Spontaneous Random Voluntary Testing Or Else, or maybe elect to spend time in conversations with the Human Resource Department of Avoided Conversations. It's easier to peek and see that next month's picture is kittens.

I thought we had covered this adequately last year, but apparently not because we're still getting confused letters to this office, many of them asking for directions to Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor, which closed in 1987, and that spot in the mall's been replaced with an Unattractive Clothing In Purple shop. While good news for fans of niche markets, it means I have to explain once again we're talking about taking your emory boards or, for particularly strong fabrics like denim jeans, metal files, and shaving them down.

Just start from the more frayed edge, probably on the outside, and rub the file back and forth until the skin on your knuckles is completely gone. Stop before you reach bone, either yours, the file's, or the clothing's. That's the signal to go looking for the liquid bandages. They're in aisle 5 at the supermarket, or aisle 7 at the not quite so supermarket, and you could have sworn you got some last time you did this. Actually what you got was a bottle of Concentrated Agony, so feel free to put that on your knuckles. The suffering will help you remember how happy you were before starting all this.

Now some fresh letters I've gotten in asking for directions to Beefsteak Charlie's, which, again, closed in like 1992, pointing out that filing clothes is not the other kind of filing, but was the other other kind, which was the first kind, so the above paragraphs were ridiculous. I can only suppose I fell into the sway of the powerful bottled Concentrated Agony syndicates, and I'm scared of what my payoff is going to be.

What makes filing clothing challenging is the need to select a filing system. Alphabetical order is popular, but regarded as cliche. Stick to this scheme and you risk people judging your clothing files as musty and old-fashioned, and your wardrobe may develop bustles. Spontaneously formed bustles are prone to becoming inflamed, and in this state to wander into motor vehicle offices and start quarrels about whether people in New England call it ``pop'' or ``burst''.

Filing by size is appealing to start with, but it encourages the development of a sick, dangerous society in which the smaller articles of clothing attempt to merge into mass entities strong enough to bring down their larger predators, while the top-of-the-food-chain articles of clothing such as muumuus or automobile tarps try to devour their competitors before they're hunted down in turn. You'll have a horde of shambling, ripped-up and poorly self-stitched Frankensteinian monster-clothes, socks trying to be the heads of hoodies, pantyhose that walks like a sweater, handkerchiefs unaware know it isn't still 1958, and worse, in a process requiring up to three-quarters of an hour to complete.

A filing system growing in popularity according to people who'd lose money if it were not reported to be growing in popularity is filing according to how unclassifiable they are. This produces numerous accusations of immaturity from the people trying to build automatic, self-filing clothing, who are fed up with their clothing robot systems bursting into a paradox-induced flame before exploding and putting all the clothing in the plastics recycling bin. They belong in ``glass and/or clothing''.

Still mysterious is why the calendar next month would be kittens when you got the Star Trek Starships calendar. Maybe they're space kittens.

[ I'd had a thought about a way to completely rewrite this as a different piece, but too late to actually rewrite and see how the experiment turned out. I reserve the right to take the meat of this and use it for later experiment. ]

Trivia: The National Cub of Washington appears to have been the first Eastern baseball team to venture west of the Alleghenies, taking a three-thousand-mile journey through Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, Saint Louis, and Chicago in 1867. Source: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History Of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: New Jersey From Colony To State, 1609 - 1789, Richard P McCormick. The startling thing here is a mention of a college in New Brunswick in 1731, which seems about a generation too early to be possible. Probably it just got garbled in the editing.

PS: The Difference Of Two Triangles ... more of Trapezoid Week! Formula-generating, at last, here.