Dirty Dishes
By H.G. Miller
There are a multitude of reasons I’m not doing dishes right now.
The most important is that I simply don’t like doing them. I don’t like scrubbing the hardened malt-o-meal off of my favorite – okay, only – sauce pan, because I know that I’m only going to use it to make more delicious malt-o-meal which will create another hardened mess that I need to clean up again in order to eat.
It’s a viscous cycle and I won’t tolerate it.
Of course, I have many other excuses that I use to successfully avoid doing the dishes.
Sometimes, I get so caught up in contemplating the origin of my dishes that I never get around to disposing of them.
I mean, seriously, where do all of those dishes come from? I’d guess that at least 90 percent of my meals are cooked in cardboard boxes and consumed off of paper plates. I’m sure that I’ve rinsed out the same cereal bowl every day for about a year straight, so that can’t be the culprit.
Yet, every night when I come home from work, a pile of soiled utensils so grotesque they could probably make baby Jesus cry dares me to bust out the apple-scented dish soap I got on sale at the 99-Cent Store.
Normally, I avoid the sullied dishes by grabbing a clean one from the cupboard. Unfortunately, I always seem to be out of fresh dishes. Total double-whammy.
Maybe it’s because I only own about six dishes to begin with. After years of bachelor living, I have only managed to retain three glasses that don’t contain some kind of novelty slogan and/or sports team insignia.
All of the good bowls were broken in college and replaced with those Glad-brand “disposable” plastic containers.
I only have one plate that isn’t cracked and I save that for when my fiancé comes over because I don’t want her to realize what she’s gotten herself into just yet.
Some of the problem is procrastination. If I even
think
PBS will be running one of those fascinating Charlie Rose interviews then you can’t get me away from that couch.
Then there’s the actual doing of dishes. I bet if I did that every once in a while, there would probably be a few clean forks around to eat this pudding snack with. Did I mention how this whole thought process got started? I’m out of the plastic knives I was using to eat my pudding with when the plastic forks ran out after all the plastic spoons had been used…
Anyway, back to the justifications for evading my only real adult responsibility besides feeding the cat. Uh, hold on a sec… okay, she was all right. Little kitten found herself some old shoestrings to chew on for sustenance. I tell ya, she’s a survivor.
Back to the dishes. You see, I have very sensitive hands. If I leave them in soapy water too long, then they get all pruney and I have trouble working the TV remote. If I can’t flip channels fast enough to get my Charlie Rose fix, then all hell breaks loose. I’m not kidding. I get moodier than a cat that’s been chewing on shoestrings for the last three days.
I guess what I’m saying is, I need to get a roommate. Maybe they’ll bring some dishes with them when they move in. Yeah. That’s a great plan.