Everyone should have a dishwasher.
Last weekend, I returned home to house-sit for my parents. “House-sit” may be a somewhat generous term considering that I realized only after my departure that I had forgotten to bring in the mail and set the garbage bins out for collection, but that is not important. What is important is that I, for the first time in months, got to use a dishwasher and I finally remember what it is like to be in love.
When I moved into my apartment, I was disappointed that I did not have a dishwasher, but I decided that its other qualities made it worthwhile. It has 20 feet of curtain glass windows that look out over a park. The walls are made of concrete. It was designed by my favorite architect in the world and might, in New York or Chicago, cost many thousands of dollars each month.
I was determined that the dishwasher problem would be fine. Surely I could get past this one issue to live in what was, otherwise, the perfect studio apartment. I have a robust ability to suffer and imagined I would be able to make it.
After nearly two years, it brings me no pleasure to report that the lack of a dishwasher has defeated me at last.
At first, there was no trouble. I was out at work for most of the day and often out of town for days at a time. Dishwashing was a minor chore, and I took pride in my sparkling dishes. With the plague, though, dishwashing has become a central part of my life.
Many people remark that, for all its miseries, the quarantine of the last year has returned time to them. Without the trouble of commutes and errands, they have read books, learned languages, and grown closer to the people they love. Not me. Every single moment I have saved has gone into dishes.
I am out of patience. I approach the sink several times each day in the same spirit with which I used to approach my long highway commute: a sense of total, all-encompassing fury. Even the cleanup from a small pasta lunch is enough to emotionally destroy me for hours. Eating a large meal prepared from scratch — no matter how delicious it is — has no appeal. The specter of the dishes exists only feet away in the kitchen with its threat to dominate the rest of the evening.
Hand-washing dishes, in my mind, occupies the same space as the Dickensian workhouse treadmill. It is an unnecessary, old-fashioned torture. Water that is hot enough to clean is too hot to touch. Detergent dries out the hands of the condemned (which, by the time the process is done, are the only dry things in a five foot radius). Getting the process right — effectively cleaning and degreasing dishes — takes something approaching an eternity, and the end product in the best of cases is glassware covered in little hard water spots.
Some people (often people who own dishwashers) offer well-intentioned — but completely oblivious — suggestions to “use fewer dishes” or “learn to wash the dishes faster.” Both of these solutions hinge on a worldview in which clean dishes are completely irrelevant. Why not just eat lunch on a plate still covered in toast crumbs from breakfast? Why go to the trouble of even owning more than one drinking glass? In college, I associated with some people who washed their dishes with incredible speed. I made a point never to eat off of those dishes.
Using the dishwasher at my parents’ last weekend finally sent me around the bend. The process was so beautiful and effortless and the dishes were glistening. They somehow felt different — cleanliness that not even the most refined hand-washing process can achieve. Jealousy has overtaken me.
If people cared to think about the problem of dishwasher accessibility in American life, there would be riots in the streets. I am serious.
There is no affordable housing in a walkable place with a good dishwasher. It does not exist. Anybody looking to live in a city and have a dishwasher must, on the various rental websites, activate the “luxury apartment” filter. This, to me, is hilarious.
When I was a child, we visited the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, which was built with the money from the Vanderbilt railroad fortune. It included 250 rooms, one of which was an indoor swimming pool. Perhaps this warped my young mind with an unrealistic vision of what counts for luxury, but I still feel that most “luxury” housing misses the mark. Weird little hipster lights, a half-functional thermostat, and a dishwasher are nice, but I feel that the term “luxury” implies more extravagance. A dishwasher is not an extravagance.
Everyone should have a dishwasher. I do not mean this in the sense that some people might say, “Everyone should visit the Grand Canyon once in their lifetime,” or, “Everyone should starch their shirt collars.” When I say that everyone should have a dishwasher, I mean that dishwashers ought to be recognized as a fundamental human right. It is unconscionable that we do not make dishwashers available to all people as a matter of course. Dishwashers should be required by building codes just as much as sinks and toilets and fire alarms.
One in three American households has no dishwasher. One in three Americans lives a life in which they are forced to spend untold hours each week toiling over the kitchen sink, drying out their hands and doing only a mediocre job of cleaning dishes. Each week, Americans squander tens of millions of hours washing dishes by hand. We could be writing great symphonic works, curing cancer, or scrolling endlessly through Twitter. Instead, we are trapped.
Most of the great promises of modernity have been shattered. Flying cars never came to pass, and even the miracle of flight by regular means has become objectionable as the airlines cram more people into smaller seats. Colonizing Mars increasingly seems to be the realm of a private sector Californian wing nut. The four-hour workweek never materialized, but it somehow takes four hours longer to get between Chicago and New York by train today than it did eighty years ago, and they have taken out the dining car.
When it comes to twentieth-century promises of humanity liberated from daily toil by harnessing the power of the machine age, the dishwasher is all we have. It is a simple machine. It is cheap for landlords to install. There is no reason that Americans should spend millions of hours each week washing dishes. We deserve to live lives of value! We deserve to be liberated from the tyranny of the kitchen sink! We deserve dishwashers!
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Michigan’s Bottle Bill is a Mess. Time for Reform or Repeal.” By Chad Livengood in Crain’s Detroit Business. (No paywall.)
Michigan’s bottle deposit law is fascinating and delightful. Sure it increases rates of recycling and protects the environment or something, but the real joy is the culture around it. The bottle deposit law is a key to Michigan culture. Last week, I wrote about the pleasure of being from somewhere. Ten-cent bottle deposits are a part of being from Michigan as much as Great Lakes or potholes or anything else.
There is a Seinfeld episode about Michigan bottle deposits. Without prompting, Michiganders stack bottles and cans neatly next to trash cans. They could never just be thrown away. In college, I was once subject to a roommate agreement that included a section on the distribution of bottle deposit returns among roommates. As a child, bottle deposits were a source of income — I remember filling my dad’s messenger bag with cans and biking across town to cash in at the D&W.
On the Michigan Legislature website, the “Bottle Bill” is listed as a “frequently requested law” alongside the Freedom of Information Act, Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act, and the Public Health Code. When I worked in the Legislature, one of the most thrilling phone calls I ever made was to the man at the Department of Treasury who is in charge of administering the bottle deposit program.
The Bottle Bill is Michigan and Michigan is the Bottle Bill. Not everybody can tell you that the state flower is the apple blossom. Everyone knows that an empty Oberon bottle is worth ten cents.
The Bottle Bill, however, is in shambles. This pill is hard to swallow. It excludes any container that did not once contain a carbonated beverage. It is a regulatory nightmare.
Perhaps the most Michigan thing about the Bottle Bill is that it is held together by an untouchable political pyramid of toothpicks and marshmallows. If nothing else, Livengood’s article is a fascinating look at the strange world of Lansing politics, esoteric special interests, and the reasons we cannot change things — even when the need for change is obvious.
“House Hunting in 2021 Bingo” by Lisa Borders in McSweeney’s.
“Half a million dollars buys a lean-to with a waterproof tarp, just minutes from the train.”