Cleaning 4: What Does It Mean To “Wash The Dishes”?

Posted: May 18th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Miconian At Large | Tags: cleaning, dishes | No Comments »

When I was about twenty-four, I moved into a large house in Seattle with six other residents. It was not the first time in my life that I’d lived somewhere without an automatic dishwasher. But it was the first time when several conditions were met at the same time:

• I was cooking for myself frequently, and so often generated dirty dishes.
• Nobody else was there to do the dishes for me.
• There was no dishwasher.

My six housemates were often annoyed with me because I would leave dirty dishes in the sink for long periods of time before washing them. I didn’t want to be a difficult housemate, and yet I dreaded washing dishes so much, and I was putting so much energy into cooking, that after I ate, I didn’t want to ruin the experience with cleaning.

It almost seemed that, by cleaning up and putting away all the plates, cups, spatulas, pans, and spoons that I’d just soiled, I was somehow saying that to make the mess in the first place had been wrong. And I didn’t want to feel like it was wrong. I had cooked very seldom growing up, or even in college, and I was proud of myself for finally forging ahead in the difficult but righteous path of preparing my own meals. Why, after a successful sortie, must I be sent to the scullery, as if to atone for sins?

One day, I was in the kitchen, talking to Mel, the fellow housemate with whom I got along with the best. My dishes were in the sink, and we both knew it, so out of respect for her, I started to wash them while we talked.

Suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, she stopped speaking, and stared at my hands. I looked. I was holding a soapy bowl. I looked back at her.

“I know why you hate doing the dishes so much,” she said.
“Why?” I asked, truly wanting to know.
“Because it takes you five minutes to wash one fucking bowl,” she said.

This was a big revelation for me. I was washing too slowly. More importantly, the standards of dish-washing allowed me to wash faster. And then I realized exactly what made cleaning so laborious and difficult for me: I had no idea what “clean” meant, from the perspective of the person doing the cleaning.

My main experience of washing dishes was rinsing them quickly, then placing them in a machine that effectively sterilized them. I remember, as a kid, sometimes finding plates in a “clean” dishwasher, with tenacious chunks of food still stuck to them. The solution in those cases was to scrape off the offending chunk, and then to leave the tainted plates in the dishwasher for another cycle.

Washing the plate by hand just didn’t occur to me. I didn’t know how to do it. And even though I knew about how to do it in theory, I was afraid that I wouldn’t do it right. Cleaning is a serious business, I would think. It keeps people safe and healthy, keeps away bugs and vermin. And clearly, doing it by hand is a painstaking, laborious, labor-intensive process. Otherwise, why does my family have a big noisy machine to take care of all that for us?

And so, years later, when I finally had no alternative but to take up the task myself, my attitude was that I was taking on something ancient, something obsolete, something for people who hadn’t heard of dishwashers, or perhaps had something against electricity. Every time I approached a pile of dirty dishes, I felt like I was preparing to dig a tunnel through granite with a spoon. And then I proceeded at about the same pace. After all, the dishwasher took about an hour to run, and that was state-of-the-art machinery meant to replace human labor. How long should the same job take a human? Two hours? Four? All night, maybe?

So, yes… I didn’t clean, or cleaned inadequately, because I was so concerned about the importance of cleaning.

A few take-aways:

• Cleaning is, very often, more about clearing away clutter than it is about sanitizing. Sure, you want to get every microbe of bacteria off the dishes. But doing that is not as important as getting them washed, dried, and back in the cabinet within, say, half an hour.
• Some years later, I lived with, and for a while was supported by, a friend of mine with a very clean house and a fierce, sharp mind; a mathematician, C++ programmer, and avid bicyclist. I knew without having to ask that if all the dishes weren’t spotless and dry within an hour after the meal, he was going to go ballistic. So I just made myself clean thoroughly and fast and within the right time frame, meal after meal, day after day, because I had to.
• After that, doing dishes has never seemed like much of a chore. I live alone now, cook frequently, and do my own dishes every day.
• Once, I found myself in the awkward situation of being at a friend’s apartment while I was on LSD, and the other five people there were not. I found the kitchen sink full of soapy bubbles, and amused myself by poking my finger into it.
  “Does that seem cool?” someone asked me. “Or is it just, you know… dirty dishwater?”
  And suddenly, like magic, that’s all it was.

image by lsgcp

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