washing dishes

any time a group of [unrelated] people live together, washing the dishes eventually becomes a point of contention. i'm not sure why this is the case, but it has happened to every set of roommates i've known, including the ones of which i've been a part. nobody wants to wash anybody else's dishes, and most people don't even want to wash their own. at the same time, nobody wants a sink full of dirty dishes, and people get really upset if they pull a dirty dish out of the cupboard.

doing the dishes is actually one of my more favorite household chores (laundry being the other), but i'm not going to do it for just anyone. there's something about taking care of one's own belongings, and even moreso taking care of one's own place, that just makes certain tasks less despicable. (the word stewardship has been bouncing around in my brain a lot over the past few months; i think that it may apply here and that it merits more thought.) i'm finding now that i live on my own that washing the dishes is an even greater pleasure, because i know that everything in the sink is mine, and i'm responsible for it. furthermore, pulling dirty dishes out of the cupboard doesn't piss me off as much (or happen as frequently, by my standards) either, because i know that if something isn't the way i want it to be, i was responsible for that too.

maybe it's just taking pride in one's own responsibility, and the frustration that arises when one either has one's responsibility taken from them, or has another's responsibility effectively forced onto them.

there have been times when i have literally gotten into screaming, yelling fights over the state of the dishes. i have friends who've taken more passive-aggressive routes, washing only their own dishes, or ceasing to cook anything at home when the sink gets full. (one even packed the dirty dishes his roommate had promised to clean into a box shortly before they moved into a new apartment together--that didn't end well.) those who are "quiet" about it never fail to complain to everyone who visits the kitchen when the roommate isn't there.

maybe it foreshadows that i will eventually be doomed to a life of domesticity, but there have also been times when washing the dishes has dropped me unexpectedly into an almost absurd state of contentment. all of these have centered around peaceful dishes-washing relationships--much harder to come by than hostile perpetually-full-sink roommate situations. i have stood alone in the kitchen washing dishes after someone else cooked a meal that we shared, and been profoundly happy. drying the dishes as someone else cleans them, and being the person to put everything in its right place--perhaps for the first time--has meant more to me than i can condense into a sentence this week. what is it that makes us want to care for that which does not belong to us?

...this is not as simple a subject as i intially imagined it to be.