When my ex N.T. and I moved in together, we bought several appliances with which to furnish our new home, including but not limited to a portable dishwasher. This seemed the height of luxury to us, as we lived in a huge but ramshackle apartment in the middle of nowhere in Washington Heights. For those of you who have never operated a portable dishwasher before, this is how it works: there’s a hose running out of the dishwasher that you attach to the faucet of the sink in your kitchen/bathroom; you turn on the faucet at the same time as the dishwasher, which somehow possesses the native intelligence to tell the faucet when to shut off. N.T. also bought a hideous dish-drying rack, which I kept hiding in progressively more obscure cabinets and which he kept finding and returning to a place of honor on the kitchen counter. I figured that if we had a dishwasher, however second-class, a drying rack was redundant.
When N.T. moved out, he left the dishwasher but took the drying rack with him; honestly, it was almost worth losing the one to get rid of the other. One evening I went to do the dishes unredundantly–it may have been after this dinner–and realized that I didn’t have any dishwashing powder. “Well,” I thought, “I can either go out to the grocery store and get more, which would take time and energy and money, or I can improvise.” So I filled the dishwasher with hand soap, turned it on, and went to watch TV.
When I returned to the kitchen an hour later, imagine my surprise when I found the floor covered in what seemed like three feet of foam but was actually two feet of foam and a foot of water. “Well,” I thought, “I can either clean this up or just leave it where it is and deal with it in the morning.” So I went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning and went into the kitchen, the floor was both completely dry and cleaner than it had been since the day I’d moved in two years earlier.
What I learned from this experience is that if I ignore my problems, they will go away.
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