I'm Too Old for This

Well, much as I believe it should be optional, reality started setting in early, and I've been having some difficulty with it (nothing new there!). Clearly, Holland is every bit the consumer culture that the U.S is. People seem to be really into the latest "cool" gadgetry - fancy cell phones that do everything but cook dinner for you, flat-screen tvs, computers, internet, video gaming systems, the whole bit. But try to cook or do the laundry, and the situation is somewhat primitive, by my standards. I admit to being a spoiled American and taking lots of things for granted. But since this is a major industrialized western nation with all that other luxury crap, it strikes me as bizarre that I'm dealing with a toy refrigerator, a toy oven, a washing machine that requires 90-120 minutes to do a single (not very large) load of laundry, and a dryer so inefficient that most laundry has to be hung on a line. I mean, the high-tech luxury stuff is fun and all, but are not, as far as I'm concerned, requirements of daily living. The requirements of daily living do include food and laundry management, and I'm finding it very frustrating that these things are so difficult, limited, and unnecessarily complicated. I mean, I don't care what features the cell phone has, as long and I can turn it on and make a call (which, by the way, I could not figure out how to do), but it does bother me that I can't fit a bottle of seltzer into the refrigerator and that a 9" x 13" pan (and nothing in addition at the same time) barely fits into and is practically impossible to remove from the oven (major accident risk, that). The owners of this house clearly are more interested in wine than food, because the kitchen's built-in temperature-controlled wine cellar occupies double the space the refrigerator does. 

It irks me to have to hang up the wash to dry (on lines, I might add, that are much too high for me to reach comfortably because the owners of this house are freakin' giants). It's the 21st century, for cripes sake! With skype, I can make an inexpensive phone call or computer-to-computer web cam-enhanced call to just about anywhere in the world; why I am hanging laundry up on a line to dry? In a country, I might add, in which the average monthly relative humidity ranges from 67%-88%, and in which some degree of precipitation occurs an average of 217 days per year (translation: forget about hanging the laundry outside to dry). And many people here don't even own clothes dryers.

I do feel guilty and spoiled for letting things like appliances depress me (but in my own defense, in case you imagine I am exaggerating, see below for the actual photos of the actual appliances in our rented house with the actual recently remodeled, up-to-date kitchen - bring back dorm room memories?). The truth is I'm feeling too old for this. I could probably have adapted fine in my 20's or 30's, but I just don't want to live like a graduate student any more, and I do want things to be fairly easy, uncomplicated, and comfortable. It's way more difficult for me to figure out, learn, and remember things than it used to be, which makes me nervous about incipient Alzheimer's (Ben used to pronounce it "old-timers," because that's what he thought the word was!). My mind is obviously nowhere near as nimble as it used to be, but I'm not so far gone yet that I can't notice the significant decrements in my cognitive functioning. I've been aware of my dropping IQ for a while, but it's not so noticeable when you're in a familiar environment in which you know how things work and have some sense of mastery. In a new and unfamiliar environment it becomes very noticeable. So I don't want to memorize or keep track of another whole set of phone numbers, account numbers, PIN codes, and passwords. I don't want to have to  read a whole new collection of users manuals (in Dutch, go figure!) because I can't figure out how anything works. When I turn on an appliance or electronic device - and it shouldn't be too hard, what with having a Ph.D. and all, to figure out how to turn these things on and off - I have this apparently naive assumption that it will actually go on and be usable. I leave you to imagine my frustration when things just don't happen that way.

There is a bright spot, though. I did finally figure out that it is possible to get the dryer to actually dry the laundry. See, there are approximately eleventy billion settings on the darn thing, but most of them are decoys! I was fooled at first, until I discovered the only setting that actually gets the clothes dry is "extra," which I had initially incorrectly interpreted according to American standards as "under no circumstances run anything potentially flammable for a full cycle in this mode unless you want your items alight or shrunken down to Madurodam size (and I don't mean the whole park, I mean the 1/25th scale model people in it, in case that wasn't clear)." It's a nefarious trick to fool Americans, I tell you! But now that I've realized "extra" is not a health and safety hazard, things are actually getting dried in substantially shorter than a 24-hr. period. I love modern technology, don't you?