Dishes qua Gravity Defiant Devices

Today is a good day already. I woke up naturally, having had a dream in which I was excited to perform some task (I don't remember what), but woke up too soon to dream the performance of the task. I think the precisely oriented excitement of my dream translated into a vague and general giddiness, and I am just thrilled to be working and living today. When I start days like this, not much can happen to ruin them. (Please make no attempts to prove me wrong on this point since I am pretty sure that any goal-oriented individual dedicated to such a task could quickly achieve it.)

My good day is not what inspired this post, though. It was a quick glance over at the maid that did it. Context: The rent I pay for the apartment includes water, utilities, maid service, and fresh milk. The fresh milk isn't in the contract, but it shows up when the friend of our landlord is feeling generous (read: overstocked). The maid comes every day but Sunday, a day when every business opens late, closes early, or doesn't open at all, which seems odd to me in a Muslim society where Sunday is not of religious import. On Monday mornings, there is a passive aggressive pile of dishes lying in wait for her, spilling out of every sink (we have three if you include the sink in my personal kitchen in addition to the two in the common kitchen), making it clear to the maid that her days off are completely unwelcome disruptions to the week. At least, that is how it would come across to me if I were the maid. It is taking her over an hour to get through all of our dishes (the dishes of four adults and one child over the period of one afternoon and evening), and the tower of clean dishes drying beside her seems to send a direct response to the threat of the original pile: "Try this again, and there won't be any dishes left to pile up," says the precarious angle of the top several strata of plates, cups, pitchers, and jars. From my vantage point, the clean dish pile looks like an optical illusion, because certainly physics has something to say about any assemblage that proposes to dangle a bowl from the end of a pitcher perched upon a jar pinched between a plate and the side of a Gladware container, the obliquity of which can be explained by the fact that one of the container's corners is being swallowed by a wide-mouthed mug, which itself seems less than stable atop a jumble of utensils whose violent disarray alone bespeaks suppressed rage.

The funny thing is, we did do our own dishes yesterday – as in, we did the dishes that the maid normally would have done first thing in the morning, the ones we leave after making lunch and dinner the day before. I.e., the pile we left was not two days' worth of culinary adventures as measured by the dishes left behind; we started yesterday afternoon with our customary clean slate. I get the sense, though, that we all had a kind of perverted pride in the fact that we had done the dishes ourselves, and were therefore more willing to recreate the pile in one of those I-have-earned-it-through-blood-sweat-and-tears moments that many dads are famous for: "I used to walk ten miles in the snow every day to get to school... barefoot... carrying twenty pounds of books in a burlap sack... " serves to justify any demand a father may make of his (or others') children, and concurrently vindicates all current laziness on the part of said father. I guess our version is, "we cleaned ten hundred dishes yesterday morning... soapless... with nothing but spit and our bare hands" (because, as we all know, these stories need a pinch of elaboration to get through and serve their purpose). Or maybe our sudden increase in dirty dish production was the result of a line of thought more akin to, "we saved you so much work that now, no matter how much we produce, it is a lot less than you would have had to do, so, really, you should be thankful." Yeah, that brand of self-righteousness sounds just about right. Anyhow, I can't look the maid in the eye this morning, so all I have to look at in that direction is the afront to physics that she keeps adding to. But, of course, breaking the laws of physics sends a louder message to me than puppy dog eyes or an evil eye (since I haven't looked, I don't know which one she is opting for), maybe I'll just work at the coffeehouse until she's done. If she can speak this ariculately through dishes, I don't want to know what she'll say when she gets to my living room – the one that is clearly the result of a perverse revelatory high associated with the awareness that I will only have maid service like this for another few weeks, and the feeling that I should take complete advantage of the opportunity intrinsic to this state. Uh-oh. She is getting the broom. She's about to go in. --I'm out of here--