Macho Chef: Dishwashing daydreams

If I can pass on any useful knowledge to my kids, I would advise them to make enough money to hire somebody else to do the dishes.  Because the truth of the matter is that my dislike for washing dishes is shared by the entire family, including Mrs. Chef.  We tried different coping strategies, but the experiment to teach an eight-year old to scour plates and bowls only resulted in countless shards of Fiesta Ware scattered across the kitchen floor.  Sometimes there is no one willing to do the dishes.

Occasionally the tableware starts to stack up, and the supply of silverware gets so low that the kids are eating their morning breakfast cereal with cupped hands and spoons made from cleverly assembled Lego blocks.

Once, two days after a Super Bowl party, we had stacked the dishes so high that they jammed the door of the cabinet over the kitchen counter and threatened to kill the aloe vera plant, because the pile was blocking the sunlight through the kitchen window.  It is my eternal shame that, after evaluating that pile of dishes and recognizing how desperately we needed to clean the counter before everyone in the house caught dysentery and just up and died, I only washed three bowls so the stack became low enough for me to reach the last clean coffee cup.

Eventually, even I break down and decide to wash the dang dishes. But I have ways to deal with the tedious boredom which are more entertaining than reflections on how suffering is good for my character.

I play little games where I imagine the inner surface of the metal turkey roaster has become an artist's canvass and I am the reincarnation of Jackson Pollock creating an abstract expressionist masterpiece by smearing the damp overcooked crust left in a pan that has soaked in its own glop for 24-hours.

Or I pretend that an entire civilization has cropped up from the bacteria on the mountain of plates, and this emerging civilization has formed an intricate society based on dirty porcelain, like a planet-sized apartment building for salmonella and e coli.  But now, I think, the little germ civilization has become corrupt.  The microscopic citizens conduct orgies within the primordial ooze and publicly feed political prisoners to trained macrophages in the bacterial version of the Roman Coliseum.  And at that point my job is to be the vengeful hand of the mighty god of miniscule organisms.  I swoop down with my Titanic Green Scrubby of Nylon Torment and the Blue Angel of Palmolive Death and teach this hedonistic civilization of itty-bitty cretins just what it means to face the unrelenting wrath of a god with a Type-A personality.

Sure, I may be indulging in that maligned portion of the male psyche that some people might think is just an over-inflated ego, but at least the dishes are clean.