That raging feeling when you're already pissed off that you have to do the dishes (by hand ... all the dishes I do are by hand, because I have never lived in a house with a dishwasher in my almost fifty years of life in the United States of America) ... and one of your plastic bowls gets STUCK inside another matching plastic bowl!
It would be funny to watch someone ELSE wrestling with and cursing at the obstinate thin plastic perfectly form-fitted to one of its siblings, trying to get it unstuck ... finally getting it unstuck and having soapy dishwater FLY THROUGH THE AIR and all over your shirt-front. But when it's you (okay, when it is ME, myself) it is not so fucking funny.
This is one of those menial fine-motor skill laborious tasks that do not require enough physical energy to RELIEVE some of your STEAM as it builds up pressure and more pressure and more pressure until you think you're going to blow. So you just ... BLOW. And it's all splashy and wet like some big bully in a swimming pool who won't stop "pretending" to drown you FOR FUNSIES. You are helpless. You just have to take it.
It's the kind of bullshit that makes you feel like inanimate objects are conspiring against you, fucking with you with such precision that the bowls MUST have wicked minds, or are imbued with some kind of justice engine to teach high-strung assholes LESSONS in PATIENCE (that we will never ever seem to learn, proving of course that we have seriously defective characters and are loose cannons who should never be trusted with anything breakable, let alone other human beings).
I think one of the problems is how often we underestimate household chores. We underestimate their complexity and how long they will take. We underestimate the variety of skills and strengths required to do these mundane repetitive tasks that are seriously devalued by the patriarchy. So we try to -- HAVE to -- squeeze them in between "important" work, viewing them as obstacles to completing the supposedly-more valuable work ... obstacles to being able to relax after that work is done, etc. They are these endless-feeling time-sucks that we fail to experience as intrinsically rewarding. Housework is supposed to be easy AND simple -- even a MACHINE can do it! But you know most machine dishwasher actually suck ass in my experience (albeit limited). We approach the dishes with resentment and disdain, failing to have gratitude, failing to find ways to accept the practice of cleaning up as opportunities to savor our resources, failing to acknowledge how much energy and intelligence actually is required to do a good job of keeping a clean, healthy, tidy, useful, reliable home and kitchen.
*****
I would like to wrap this up in a more polished manner, perhaps with some kind of wisdomful solution that puts my bitchiness to rest, but instead I have to just accept that doing SOME of the dishes is better than none of them. That no matter how much effort and anger I put into housework I, personally, am always going to have more shit lined up on the counter to grapple with, more crumbs on the floor, more dishwater-sopped and water-spot-stained shirts to try to patiently go through ... one. Dish. At. A time.
Pulling on the bowls when they're stuck inside each other makes it worse. You have to fucking FINESSE those bitches with a gentle side-to-side push-and-pull.
No comments:
Post a Comment