Suave como el amor de Mamá
I have to confess, sometimes I can spend an embarassingly long time doing the stupidest things. For instance, the other day, I was standing in a drug store near my apartment, and I was agonizing over a very difficult choice: what kind of dryer sheets to buy. Ten minutes into this adventure, after having examined my choices up and down, resolution still seemed so far away.
I was beginning to get desperate, and a little paranoid about the people around me. That woman behind the counter…sure, she seems to be concentrating on her phone call. But what are they talking about? I can make out some Spanish, though I don’t really speak it, but could she be talking about me? “You won’t believe this guy here in the store right now. He seemed cool enough when he came in; he smiled and said hi, but he’s been standing in front of the laundry detergent and dryer sheets for a long time now. I’m starting to get worried. Maybe he’s just stalling until his friends get here and they’re going rob us. Maybe he has some kind of sexual fetish for the bear on the Snuggle fabric softener bottle. He’s so weird.”
Clearly, I needed to find a solution before she hung up and called 911.
I was out buying dryer sheets, because, it being winter time, my clothes were inundated with static electricity, which is annoying enough to me, but then it has other side effects. For example, every time I pet my cats, the experience for them must be like part touchy-feely goodness, and part torture, as little sparks leap from my fully charged fingers into their soft fur. They are forced to be like visitors to an S&M club, where any bit of love and tenderness from me might be accompanied by electrostatic-induced jolts of pain.
So there I was, buying dryer sheets. And it’s not an easy thing to do. How does one make an informed decision? Sure, I’ve seen the commercials on TV, but how am I to know if the products perform like they do in the ads? Will I really want to fall backward onto a pile of my newly washed towels? And even if so, would that kind of post-clothes-washing ecstasy really be worth it to me? Maybe I should opt for the cheapest brand – one I have never heard of. As long as it prevents my poor feline companions from being needlessly tortured, the purchase should be termed a success, right? It was only 99 cents, after all, which is quite a savings over the premium brand, selling for $1.99.
Come on, you say, that’s only a dollar difference. But look at it another way. That extra dollar increases the cost of the product by 100%. See, I tend to think in proportional terms, all the time, rather than in hard numbers. Sometimes this gets me into trouble, like when I am debating with someone about some kind of social trend, but for the most part, I find this strategy has served me well.
So you see my conundrum.
After crunching all the numbers in my feeble brain (at times, this is a bit like trying to run the latest video game on a four year-old computer), I picked up the “unknown” brand’s box, in order to examine it a bit closer. Perhaps there will be some detail in the box’s design which reveals the cheap-ass, environment-killing, rash-inducing fraud that it is. Or, maybe not. Maybe the big players are really ripping us off with their elitist $1.99 price tag…knowing full well that we will pay just for the designer label. Then again, perhaps it’s a case of the little guy undervaluing themselves, in order to gain market share, and this brand is in fact the “deal of the century”. Or maybe, just maybe, none of this matters because I can satisfy my risk-taking side, no matter how trivially, with this 99 cent venture into the unknown, and I can be prepared to enjoy the journey, even if there are some bumps along the way.
So I look at the box for clues:
And there it is, right there in front of me. All the computations and pontifications were just wasted CPU cycles, because their marketing people have solved my problem for me. How did they solve my problem? They devised the perfect slogan: “Suave como el amor de Mamá“, which is conveniently translated as “Soft as a Mother’s Love”. (Why they think “Mother’s Love” needs to be capitalized in English, I’m not sure, but this will not deter me from my utter enjoyment that these words were assembled in this fashion, and used in this context.)
So I ponder this for a moment. “Soft as a Mother’s Love”.
Man, that’s soft.
I am sold. Sign me up. I am going to risk my 99 cents on the brand I have never heard of: Suavitel. (I think this translates to “Softitel”, but hey, Spanish isn’t my first language.) Maybe you think I am a sucker. “What kind of fool believes that he can find the softness of a Mother’s Love for 99 cents?” Indeed, I would have to agree that you make a compelling point. However, what if I said to you….there it was…right there in your face, the possibility – no matter how small – to have the softness of a Mother’s Love wrapped around you all day long, everywhere you go. And you turned it down?
Me, I will take 99 cents of the money I slaved for, I earned…going to a product that will make my clothes like….like….
I will pull my clothes out of the dryer. I will look at them, as the light glows off the fabric…the softness of it caressing my hand. Irresistably, I have the urge to my raise my newly cleaned clothes toward my face, to bathe my senses their freshness, cradling my face in the warmth of the dryer – no – the warmth of a Mother’s Love.
My mind will become aflutter, suddenly flush with fond memories of the day my mother bought me that puppy and had it hidden for me behind my bedroom door; when I got hit in the head accidentally with a golf club, and it was bleeding so much, and I didn’t know what to do, and she was there, calmly comforting me, wiping the blood from my face and telling me everything would be OK. Perhaps I will have an abstract memory even further back, floating, helplessly but safely ensconced within the warmth of her womb…
99 cents lighter, I leave the store and head back to the laundromat. I open the box – and oh my god, this is not a Mother’s Love, this is one vile, horrid aroma. It’s like a truck carrying the shipment of raw materials for the Aqua Velva factory veered into oncoming traffic, colliding head-on with a minivan carrying a family of pixies and cherubs, the event culminating in a mess of cheap chemical scent residue merged with blood and pixie dust, but since the accident took place on a remote country road, no one noticed, and the bizarre concoction was left there to ferment in the sun.
Or maybe they accidentally spilled too much “freshness scent” on the box, and because everyone at the factory has developed olfactory failure from breathing in this toxic Softitel cloud for so long, no one even noticed.
Seriously, the next day, I went into my bathroom, where I keep any dryer sheets I might happen to have on hand, and the whole room reeked of this vague, but really aggressive, “putrid niceness”. If I was being nice, I’d say, “well, Suavitel is just not for people who are into subtlety”. The thing is, I’m not particularly nice.
My thoughts about Suavitel may now have soured, but cheapskate that I am, I will finish off the box, dutifully polluting my clothes until I have gotten my full 99 cents’ worth.
Now, having used it a few times, I have been reconsidering the usefullness of dryer sheets anyway. What a waste of money! How do they convince us we need this shit?
If you stop and think about it, dryer sheets are a pretty perverse expression of capitalist excess. I wonder, collectively, how much money is spent on R&D, design, manufacturing, shipping, promoting (how much did they pay the guy who came up with “Soft as a Mother’s Love?”)…and then eventually consumers buying these devices which we throw into a dryer, all to make our clothes a bit softer. If the United States gave up dryer sheets, and we instead directed those dollars and creative energies toward…I dunno…constructing self-sustaining farms and irrigation systems, or schools for the po–
Oh nevermind…sorry, little African children, no education or millet pellets for you – our fat American asses chafe under the strain of the normal softness – or, rather, lack thereof – of cotton. Therefore, we must dedicate our precious resources toward solving this grave social problem. But don’t worry, poor people of the world, we will get to you right after we figure out a way to increase the freshness factor by another 10%.
Me, I am going to return to a dryer sheet-free existence, content in the notion that by giving things up I am really moving closer toward enlightenment.
By the way, I did a Google search for Suavitel to find their URL, and this came up also: Ban Suavitel. Interesting how we both used the word ‘cloud’ to describe the way the scent just kind of lingers.