At 7.15 in the A.M., I was standing before the stove in my underwear, wondering there was any oatmeal left.
As it turned out, there wasn’t. But it took a while to come to that conclusion, because it was at this point, less than five minutes after I oozed out of bed, that my roommate chose to ask me why I never did dishes.
“I’m sorry, but I do dishes all the time when you’re out, like the other night, I was studying for a midterm,” here his face becomes saintlike, “and I stopped for half an hour and I, like, did all the dishes.”
I’m sure everyone with more than ten brain cells to their name can spot this dread move a mile away. Poking the bear. It’s the first thing you gotta learn in life. Don’t poke the bear. Don’t poke the bear.
Don’t poke the bear don’t poke the bear don’t poke the bear. But he did poke the bear, poor bastard.
And, worse, it was on hypocritical grounds. Here’s how dishes actually go down at my place:
[A large suburban house at night. Three cars are parked in front of it. All the lights are out, except for a hellish glow from one of the ground floor windows. Silence. Cut to WS IN HOUSE. A tall girl wearing a ratty blue bathrobe glowers over her glasses at a harassed looking young man, hunched before his computer screen.]
TALL GIRL
There are things crawling in the sink! The dishes are walking on their own! They’re forming a union. First demand: cleaner working conditions. Come on, dishwashing, stat.
YOUNG MAN
Fine.
[Fadeout.]
He does the dishes occasionally, sure. But as far as I’m concerned, the fact that he dumps food bits in with the dirty dishes the rest of the time far outweighs this fact. And he leaves the soggy sponge in the sink to get moldy. And when he never wipes the counter before starting dishes, so when he puts a tea towel down to dry dishes ontop of, it gets covered in kitchen detritus and jam smears, because he ALSO works right on the countertop when he’s cooking.
And he puts the tea towel down all wrinkly, and he LEAVES it there when he’s done doing the dishes, a damp wrinkly detritus-encrusted pile which I will pick up later that day and put in the wash, because he never washes the kitchen linens either.
It might be apparent that we don’t really get along.
Anyways, the punchline is that I promptly started doing the dishes and wouldn’t let him help (a little trick I learned from my mother), he started apologizing and then got mad at me, and from there we moved through usual argument motions, which culminated in the Slammed Door, harbinger of Peace and Quiet.
Then I skipped all my classes and went back to bed.
