I’m here today to talk to you about washing the dishes.
Many of you have experienced this chore in your lifetime, but some of you have not.
For example, I would bet all my milk money that my daughter’s 21-year-old boyfriend, who lives at home with his family, has never touched a dishrag in his life, even though he’s an employed adult who eats food quite regularly. It’s going to be a major shock when he finally moves out and discovers that dishes really don’t wash themselves. Someone has to put them in the dishwasher. Though if he gets himself the kind of wifey that my daughter will never be, maybe he won’t.
My kids have always treated dirty dishes as if they were covered with spent nuclear waste, and they’d have to go into an isolation chamber if they so much as brushed against one of them.
We’ve had a dishwasher in our kitchen for a long time now, but even that seems potentially deadly to them, apparently, because they pick up the dishes so gingerly and throw them in there with such force that it’s a miracle from Lourdes that any of them survive.
I point out that we have rubber gloves, but finding and putting them on involves extra work they’re not willing to take on. It’s hard even to get them to unload the clean dishes, but I always insist. See, I remember being a kid, when my sole purpose in life was to make it so aggravating for my mother to force me to do chores that she would simply do them herself. I got out of so much work by driving her crazy, and I refuse to give my adult children the satisfaction.
I’m too mean and cranky to have a husband, but let me just say this about guys: Your work is entirely suspect. Now, I don’t mean all you guys. Some of you are quite tidy. In fact, I dated a guy who was so persnickety he used to rearrange all the dishes after I put them in his dishwasher to meet with his exacting standards. I couldn’t marry him, though. I would never have measured up.
I used to be one among a group of friends who went camping together every Memorial Day, before we got lazy and booked cabins instead. I remember one night when we ladies cooked a big dinner and the guys offered to wash up. None of us was paying any attention to the washing process going on behind us until one of my girlfriends came over, looking like she’d just seen Bigfoot on the way back from the john.
“They’re not using any soap,” she said. “I was just watching the guys wash and they’re not using any soap.” Yikes. Good job, guys. You managed to get out of washing all dishes, forever.
I do remember when I had my first apartment – back in the days when low rents meant a single gal could actually afford to live alone. I would let the dishes pile up in the sink on the theory that the mold they generated could produce penicillin that would be beneficial to mankind. (That was also the time in my life when I would simply buy new undies because I hated the laundromat.)
When people came over, I’d just put the dirty dishes in the never-used oven. Recently, I read a Dave Barry column where he discussed the practicality of putting them in the freezer instead, where they would retard mold. Too bad I never thought of that.
Over the years, various roommates and I had spats over whose turn it was to wash, or to unload the dishwasher. I do believe dishwashing is the No. 1 cause of arguments among people who live together, according to my Extremely Scientific Survey of my own past.
I know guys – and you possibly do too – who simply use paper plates and disposable cutlery for everything so they don’t have to wash. But that just seems like going over the edge. I mean, no one in my family is actually Oscar Madison from “The Odd Couple.”
Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds the topic divisive, because there’s a Youtube video out there that’s been seen 1.2 million times called “How to wash a god*#@&m dish.”
“If your roommate sent you this video, they’re concerned you may not know how to get off your (bleep) and wash a (bleeping) dish for once in your pathetic life. Don’t worry, washing even one (bleeping) dish isn’t that hard,” the narrator tells the viewer. “It’s so easy, there’s no reason not to do it, you entitled little piece of (bleep.)”
Good thing there wasn’t any Youtube back when I had roommates.
Next week: Who’s turn is it to take out the trash? And were you planning to put a new bag in the can?
