Ash-Matic Does Chore-Avoidance

Did I ever mention how prominently my ability to procrastinate features on my list of talents? It’s pretty high. Or it would be, if I’d gotten around to making that list.

Right now, right this second, I should be doing the dishes. There are a lot of dishes, waiting to be done.

There are bowls, plates, knives, spoons, glasses, mugs, forks, and chopping-boards. There are also pizza cartons to be thrown away, and surfaces to be wiped. All these delights are waiting for me in the kitchen, due to be done approximately yesterday, while instead I slowly list them. Why don’t I just do them? Won’t it be easier to get it out of the way? Won’t I get less trouble from Miss-Matic if I just do the frickin’ chores?

Well, yes. But I’m just going to do this first. And then make a bad cartoon about it.

Then I’ll do the dishes.

Hopefully before she gets home.

Frankly, doing the dishes is a boring chore. This is what dishwashers were hired for, and then made for.

Give me a clean, sparkly kitchen, with uncluttered sides and empty draining-racks, fill the sink with hot water and bubbles, and I’ll stand in front for it for an hour. I’ll get straws and blow bubbles into the other bubbles. I’ll play submarines with glasses and empty bottles. I’ll see how high I can make the water splash without getting any on my groin. But hand me a plate with a few crumbs of toast on it and the bubbles lose their fun.

I’ve tried many times to find a solution to this problem – if I could think of one, I could get rich, and then buy a dishwasher.

The first thing I thought of was paper plates – but then I thought about the trees. Then I thought, ‘FUCK YOU TREES! WHAT HAVE YOU EVER DONE FOR ME?‘ And then I saw a tree and it was quite pretty so I apologised for my foul-mouthed behaviour and gave it a hug.

Then I thought about plastic plates. ‘FUCK YOU PLASTIC PLATES!  WHAT HAVE YOU EVER DONE FOR ME?‘ But plastic plates are quite expensive if you buy a lot of them, and all the whiny tree-huggers don’t like it.

Then I thought about a dishwasher, but my bank balance and empty-cupboards just laughed at me. I even thought about kidnapping someone and making them do my household chores, but unless I kidnapped a new person every three or four days, feeding them would get quite expensive too – and it seemed like awfully hard work anyway.

I considered bartering. This, at first, seemed promising. If I could persuade Miss-Matic to take responsibility for the dishes, I could take care of something else, like playing Flash games to make sure the web doesn’t go out of business, or eating lovely food, or relaxing with a book so the entropy in the universe doesn’t build up too fast. But my ideas were swiftly vetoed. She said she’d consider it if I did all the washing, the hanging up of things that dry themselves after a week or so anyway, and did all the cooking. That hardly seemed fair. And then there were things like floor-mopping and vacuuming and doing the weekly shopping that still needed to be allocated.

At this point I started to wonder what-the-hell kind of life I was living. When did life suddenly become all about doing things? When I was a teenager I did nothing. A lot of it. I couldn’t quite figure out when stuff suddenly start needing to be done. I’m pretty sure it never needed doing before.

So I rejected the bartering idea. I also rejected robots, for practical and financial reasons. I didn’t need to consider eating off the floor because I’d been told about that several times already.

After all this thinking – which was quite hard work, by the way – I was left with two options. The big guns, if you like. These were the grand-daddies of all my potential machinations.

First – Will the dishes to be done. Like in Fantasia.

‘MAKE IT SO!‘ I cried, like in Fantasia. ‘ENGAGE!’

But that didn’t work.

So there I was, at my final option. Faced with a mountain-range of washable things covered in slowly-decaying food, with plentiful access to washing-up liquid and hot water, I went to watch Minecraft videos on YouTube – or whatever else was good on YouTube in those days.

And that pretty-much brings us up to date. It’s been like that ever since. I can hear those crumb-encrusted little fuckers calling me from the kitchen now, and the time in the corner of my screen is disturbingly close to Miss-Matic’s usual arrival time.

Damn it.

I guess I’d better get started on this picture.