Washing dishes is to cooking and eating, roughly what a hangover is to drinking. The crash after a high, the price embedded in a pleasure. A home-cooked meal is invariably followed by a pile of dishes – plates, spoons, bowls, forks, pans, cutting board, knives – that wallow there in the sink moping as if to say, now what about us? Yes, what about you, you little shits, won’t you clean yourselves for a change? Have you heard of the age old concept of looking after yourselves? I kid, I kid of course. As you may have already surmised, the whole business of washing dishes has become such a giant bugbear for me that I get agitated and animated just talking about it. It’s got me projecting thoughts and sentience into inanimate objects made of metal and ceramic.
I think of myself as a pretty even keeled person, a balanced guy. I have no trouble seeing both sides of a coin. I understand that for every joy you derive in life, there is a price to pay, in one form or the other. Same with cooking and dishes. I enjoy cooking, have done for a long time. A natural consequence of that is that you have dishes to clean after you cook. It’s a simple enough equation. And, I have largely been fairly civil and adult about it for most of my adult life. A dishwasher certainly helps. But, I have lived in apartments without a dishwasher for longer than I have in ones with, and it was never that big a deal. I think my disposition towards this whole business of having to wash dishes began to turn into this bête noire it has become now after I moved into a studio apartment with a very small kitchen and no dishwasher about five years ago.
The kitchen was the tiniest I had of all the living spaces I had been in. This meant that if you left dishes unwashed in the sink or lying around in the kitchen counter, even a few, it would very quickly start feeling as if the kitchen had shrunk further. You could not move things around, fix another meal without a lot of annoying clatter. So in order to avoid this, I got in the habit of doing dishes immediately after eating or sometimes even while cooking to clear room. I enjoyed cooking too much for this annoyance to prevent me from that. So as I continued to cook, for myself and for dinner gatherings with friends, the constant washing of the dishes that went along with it began to weigh on me. With big dinner parties, at least there is no surprise about the fact that that there would be a giant pile waiting for you at the end or the next morning. It was more the mid-size piles that began to really get my goat, the ones that would accumulate imperceptibly after a morning breakfast or a quick mid-afternoon snack. Eggs, toasts and coffee for breakfast equated to cups, plates, frying pans, forks to wash, first thing in the morning. A simple pasta dinner with a glass of wine would at a minimum leave a couple of pans (for boiling and frying), a plate, a wine glass, a fork, a cutting board to wash afterwards. Even a quick lunch heating up some leftovers meant a plate, a fork and a container to wash afterwards. As the months turned into years, I felt like I was constantly washing dishes when I spent time in my own place. Maybe I am exaggerating a tiny bit, but in case you still harbor any doubts, I am not aiming for much seriousness here. Only at some humor and irony. Even the best bit of humor needs a slight bit of exaggeration, just as even the best-made dishes need a touch of garnish.
And look, this is not to complain massively. I am just having a little moan, scratching an itch that’s been bothering me for a while now. An innocuous whimper I hope in the grand scheme of things. Overall, I feel I have been a fairly lucky guy in life. And one of the lucky things has also been to find a wife who enjoys cooking and eating as much as I do. And not just that, but also a fellow eat-everything-erian who enjoys similar types of food for the most part. But, let’s not get too rosy and start looking at the bright side here , because that would be boring. As luck would have it, she also does not enjoy the washing dishes part of the whole cooking and washing dishes equation. So this equation has been thrown further out of balance. We moved out of the aforementioned studio into a new one bedroom after our wedding, but, crucially, the new apartment also does not have a dishwasher. So, while we have been enjoying the home cooked meals, we have also been whining about the dishwashing. The better a meal, more elaborate the preparation, and more dishes to wash. So although this equation is unbalanced, you at least can’t accuse it of being disproportional. That’s something, I suppose. We may move soon or maybe not but when we do, getting a dishwasher feels like it should be the number one priority, even ahead of more important things such as you know the location, the commute, the rent, the view. All of which, by the way, are things that our current place has going for it, massively. And don’t even get me started about washing dishes when hungover the next day after a big dinner gathering. That’s a true meeting of the miseries if there ever was one. I get exhausted just thinking about that, and I have run out of energy and space to expand on that further here.
If you can’t quite feel commiserative towards me about this by this point, I don’t know how to convince you. I guess you are a better person overall, one who just naturally takes in their stride the responsibility that comes after the pleasure of cooking and eating. Good for you Sir, good for you Madam! As you were, please. As for me, I shall continue to moan and groan inside my head, and out aloud occasionally like this, every time I see a pile of dishes in the kitchen sink that need washing. When I move eventually to a new place with the grand luxury of a dishwasher, I do envisage a future, maybe in five years when this all will seem like a laughable, passing little stir. And I will maybe even deny that I ever made such a big deal out of washing dishes. For, our memories can play tricks with our minds. And we mostly remember what we choose to remember. So this is for posterity, this is for the record. That at one point in my life, I was so annoyed with washing dishes that I was moved to pen a little missive of misery!
Master and the Middle 