Dry Cleaning in the Urban Environment

When I moved to the big city I left behind my suburban-vehicular-centric lifestyle and became a public transit-er, and I am constantly feeling guilty every time I run into a fellow environmentalist touting that they never miss those days anymore. I do. Everytime I go to the dry cleaners, on either end of the errand. I drop off my dry cleaning on my lunch break at a place a couple blocks from the office, it is a nice nieghbourhood and it is a nice dry cleaners. "Pick Up?" I get asked, "No rush" is my standard reply because this is what my mother says (yeah, I'm like, over 30 years old, so I don't know why I am hanging onto the dry cleaning protocols learned from rote in my childhood). I always get given a day 4 days from the drop off date. In this case, that was a Saturday. Of a long weekend. So I went in on Tuesday on my lunch break to pick up said dry cleaning. Back at my cubicle a co-worker commented, "So, you picked up your dry cleaning?" is it so obvious? My errands before home included a stop off at Kinkos to print off some photos from the weekend. I slung my dry cleaning over the back of the computer station but I have a feeling it wasn't wanted. I felt self conscious on the subway all the way home. Though I reminded myself that I planned on walking from the station to my house instead of getting the bus as ususal (I gained 5 pounds on the all hummus diet recently. A friend of mine asked me to explain exactly how much hummus that is, duh, it is obviously five pounds...sheesh and I thought my math was bad...) So me and my dry cleaning walked home. Does everyone else know something I don't? Like, "people who don't have cars, don't have dry cleaning" - ?