Pressed for Time
Sometimes when I’m asked to describe “what kind of lawyer” I am, I say, I’m a lawyer who irons his own shirts.
On one hand, I’m trying to project the sense that I’m someone who’s in touch with the quotidian exercise of working life, and that I’m the opposite of a stuffed shirt. The fact is, though, that I like to iron, and I spent this morning doing some of the ironing I’ve missed during these work-at-home days.
Ironing is nice because takes its own time. You take a wrinkled thing, and to enjoy ironing it you align your intelligence and awareness with the process of heat, steam, starch, and pressure that produces a smoothly ironed thing. After practicing it many times it takes on a contemplative quality – you organize your own tempo to respect the pace and motion of the iron. It’s when the pace of ironing conflicts with the schedule of the ironor that it’s a drag. Then it seems like you don’t have time for ironing, but you’re really just out of sync with the way ironing structures your time.
Chess is another activity has its own time, too: a chess move may take half a second or two months. Many other games similarly have their own time: baseball; card games; Monopoly (which my wife calls “Monotony”!). Music has its own time, especially music that is made to be about time. Meditation has its own time, in the sense that you become aware of the pace of awareness or the slow swell of consciousness. Birding takes your awareness out of human time. Physical activity also transforms you at different rates at different times, whether swimming in the ocean or chopping wood.
Lawyering probably has its own time, too. My practice comprises text-based work product and service-based personal relationships. With the written work, it sometimes takes time for the logic of a document to come together in my mind. The first time I read a Class A shopping center lease, I couldn’t believe how many ways the landlord got paid, and how many ways the tenant absorbed all the costs and risks – I must have read it five times. Same with a big commercial construction subcontract. It took a minute to calibrate my mind to that level of inequity. It also takes time when I’m writing a legal document, just like it takes time to write anything thoughtfully. Work relationships need time for the flow of expectations and understandings that establish a lawyer’s role in a given situation. Imposing the billable hour and other fee structures on the organic pace of work and relationships is one of the core aggravations of legal practice.
I like to iron with starch, especially in the summer, when the sizing helps shirts be more comfortable in the humidity. I grew up using spray starch, which became more difficult to find in stores about 10 years ago. At some point I tried several alternatives and found Mary Ellen’s Best Press sizing. It was fantastic - an ironing revelation! It sprayed on easily, and made a finished surface that was much crisper and more even than the old aerosol starches could. It also made less of a crust on the carpet under my ironing board. The downside of Mary Ellen’s was the cost –a gallon of it online is about $40 shipped.
A few weeks ago I was down to my last few ounces of Mary Ellen’s, and just did not want to buy another jug of it. I recalled my drycleaner once saying they pressed shirts with some kind of soaking solution rather than a spray starch. With that in mind, I watered down some Mary Ellen’s and soaked some napkins, and the result was pretty good. Googling info on different ironing starch formulae, I learned that most soaking solutions were just made with food-based starches, like corn starch, but that Mary Ellen’s was probably made with methyl cellulose.
Well, as it turns out, I have a 30-year old jar of methyl cellulose powder that I used to use as a paper glue. Over several days, I used it to work out a new ironing formula that is working well.
Here’s today’s practice tip:
Dissolve 1/4 c. methyl cellulose powder in 1 qt water. It will be very clumpy for a day or two, but let it sit until it’s smooth and consistent; it’ll be a gooey, translucent glue, like wallpaper paste.
To make a batch of sizing solution, mix 1/4 c. to 1/2 c. of the “glue” in a bucket of water (about 1.5 gallons); keep track of your measurements so you can adjust the concentration of your sizing. Wet your clothes in the sizing solution – today I was able to soak 11 shirts in a tub of sizing solution. I ran the wet clothes through the spin cycle of the washing machine and hung them to dry. The sizing infuses the cloth and the dried clothes press well under a steam iron, so you don’t have to iron the whole batch right away.
Using a 1/4 cup of glue for each tub of sizing, a 1/4 cup of methy cellulose powder will make 16 tubs of ironing solution, or enough to iron 176 shirts.
In the course of figuring out my new ironing protocol I also learned that methyl cellulose is the active ingredient in the laxative Citrucel! When I follow up on that application it will produce my greatest legal blog post ever.