It’s five in the morning. I’ve been awake for the past two hours, and only slept two hours before that. Something woke me up, and then I started thinking about things, and I had a huge panic attack because everything seems so much worse at night.
I grabbed the laptop and started writing it all down, because everything seems so much better when you write it down.
An hour of frantic typing later, I do feel better, and I essentially wrote four blog-length items of things on my brain. This is one of them: the quirkiest and only non-panicky one. (In other words, the only one worth reading). Two others are mentioned, and I’ll recap one of them soon. I’m going to catch a few more hours of sleep now.
I was washing the dishes last night and was thinking about how much I hate doing dishes, and then I realized that I’ll never have a dishwasher. Never. I will spend my entire life washing my own dishes. This has always seemed like a normal thing to me – my parents didn’t have a dishwasher either (other than their children) and while I knew other people whose parents did have dishwashers, I considered it a distant thing, not meant for me. But now that it’s finally starting to dawn on me that I am no longer in grad school (hey, that only took 5 months) I’m slowly realizing that while I was getting student discounts and paying tuition for 13 years, my friends – my peers, my former classmates – all grew up, got jobs and careers and houses and mortgages and kids… and dishwashers. I’m 31, and only just got out of school. I have work, for the first half of the year at least, but not a career. My foreseeable income for 2009 will be lower than my yearly grad student stipend has been the past years. I’m easily surviving on it, though, because I don’t have to pay tuition, because you barely pay taxes if your income is so ridiculously low, and because I have never lived any other way than cheap and small and minimal. I hate doing dishes with a passion, but until last night it never occurred to me that other people of my age and social background don’t have to do dishes. I never considered luxury items or bigger living spaces, but it’s slowly starting to dawn on me that maybe I don’t want to do the dishes anymore. Maybe I don’t want to be struggling. Maybe I want to be able to live somewhere where it isn’t so small that the cat vomiting in the living room is close and loud enough to wake me up in the middle of the night and lead me to stay awake worrying about SciBarCamp and dishwashers and dead-end career plans.
I hate those middle of the night panic attacks. Please give my regards to your cat, and tell her to use the bathroom next time she has to puke.
With the sound of cat vomiting close by and your midnight paranoia (widely shared, I believe), do you not have all the ingredients for a tense, atmospheric podcast…?
Well, I always do my dishes by hand as well. It happens however that my apartment comes with a dishwasher. So you’d think it’s just standing there being harmless. But no, it turns out you can have problems with appliances even if you don’t use them. Reason is that water from the upstairs apartment comes up in my dishwasher, sits there, clogs the filters, and starts, gag, smelling. So one day I come home from a several week trip and my apartment smells like some animal died in it. I call my landlord who cleans the stupid thing and tells me to run it at least every other week just to keep it clean. So I feel bad for wasting water (but then, the water is included in the rent anyway), but run the dishwasher every other week. Last time I did that, it got a hickup and several liters of water ran into my kitchen. Eva, if you want to have my dishwasher, you can have it for free.
The good news is that (at least in New York) once you have a dishwasher and a washer/dryer in your apartment, you have officially “made it”. The bad news is, I wonder if any of us will ever have those things.
I will think of you as I do my dishes today!
Your panic attack sounds all too familiar. Except mine come in broad daylight.
I always thought that the day I have a washer and dryer INSIDE my apartment and stability enough to get a dog, my life will be complete. I don’t think that’s going to happen for a while.
The dark side of grad school (one of many) is the feeling of having to catch up to your peers once you are done. I feel like I have fallen behind somehow, just now starting from scratch, from the spot my friends were 8 years ago. Seems kind of unfair. And hard. In other words, I know what you are saying. When you figure out how to fix it all, do let me know!
Panic attacks SUCK. I hope everything improved when the sun came up.
During my final year of grad school, my friend and I wrote a song called the PhD Blues. One line goes “My friends are all on thirty grand, I drink the cheapest cider”. That was 8 years ago, and I still haven’t caught up to my friends who chose proper careers.
I do have a dishwasher though – my husband. We made a deal very early on that he would wash all the dishes and I would do all the laundry. So now I need to make sure we never ever get a dishwasher, in order to maintain a sense of household equality.
Steffi – the living room was already an improvement: she used to puke under the bed, in a corner I could only reach by lying flat on my stomach in dust or by disassembling the bed.
Stephen – No. Nobody wants to hear me when I’m panicking. People have actually said “I don’t like you when you’re this way” during my stress attacks. They’re amusing when I type them out, but I’m completely incoherent and manic in speech.
Sabine – No, I don’t want it! I don’t even have space. My kitchen is the size of a closet.
Caryn – Someone once mentioned how unrealistic the show Friends was, just based on how nobody has apartments that size in NYC!
Anna – I have them in daylight, too, but then I don’t need to be asleep so it’s fine if I’m kept awake. And a dog is on my list of life goals. It’s still nice to have a cat around, though (most of the time)
Cath – comments crossed! Yes, it’s better now, and I even slept a bit more. Ugh, and your stupid British PhD programs are so much faster, even.
Yes, but the 3.5 year post-doc didn’t give me much opportunity to catch up!
My cats rarely puke, but when they do, it’s invariably on a doormat while we’re out, so the first inkling that something is up is when you step in it as you come into the house…
Dishwashers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be- you have to semi-wash the dishes anyway before they go in so that the machine doesn’t get clogged up. They also have other additional problems, as Sabine points out. A bit like careers that others embark on while you’re still at graduate school.
My parents celebrated the birth of Gee Minima by buying us – a dishwasher. We thanked them, even though this seemed to be a backhanded comment on what they thought of our housekeeping skills. And it was a pretty decent dishwasher.
Dishwashers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be- you have to semi-wash the dishes anyway
No you don’t. Just scrape off the crocs and sharks.
I never had a dishwasher either. When I was single there never seemed any need, and even with two of us I don’t see the point. With families I can see they could be a godsend.
It sounds to me that Eva’s cat has been puking in Sabine’s dishwasher.
No you don’t. Just scrape off the crocs and sharks.
That’s true. My cat often eagerly offers to help out with the plate-scraping process also. He’s the pukey kind of feline, especially today.
I want to design a clock whose alarm sounds like a cat puking – nothing launches me out of bed faster as I scramble to drag the wretching creature onto a bit of tile.
I am not big on luxuries or gadgets, but a dishwasher significantly impacts my quality of life – even if I do have to wash the detergent off the wine glasses when the cycle is done.
It may seem grand now, but if you really visualize a future with a dishwasher, I know you can achieve it!
What is it with all these vomiting cats?! Have they been at the dishwasher tablets?
I get back to my computer and everyone is discussing cat puke =)
I find the polarity on dishwasher opinions amusing. I actually tell myself that I’m being environmentally friendly, but I probably contribute more by not owning a car and living walking distance to everything I need. I just don’t want to do dishes…
Lee, it’s hairball season. (Change of fur from winter to summer = extra shedding)
There’s an argument that dishwashers use less water and energy than doing them by hand.
Plus you actually get rid of the soap properly, which has got to be good, shirley?
There’s an argument that dishwashers use less water and energy than doing them by hand
Predictably, someone(s) has actually studied this in detail, and the good folks at treehugger are happy to share this information, as long as you can put up with a few dozen ads for products in various shades of green (from deep smug to pale innocuous).
Very glad that horses don’t lick themselves or each other during the change from winter to summer coat. Also, bezoar (human hairball) = excellent word.
Thanks Kristi.
which from a site name like that surprises me. Nice one.
Treehugger is a pretty good science-based eco site for having such a hippie name. They’re part of the Discovery Channel, and lost of their readers are really skeptical/scientific. Whenever they verge on being too…. PETA… for the sake of using just one word to describe a whole fuzzy concept, they get angry comments.
@ Richard: Of course, most people (in the US at least) are not miserly with water use, and it was keeping track of this that convinced me to use my new, energy-efficient dishwasher. On my own, I run it every fourth day or so, when it’s full. I rarely eat any meals out, and I also use the dishwasher to clean containers and utensils that I pack for my bag lunch at work.
When my eco-conscious friends visited last Thanksgiving, we used the dishwasher frequently, as it filled up quickly with three mad – for – cooking individuals in the house. Several years ago, I visited these same friends to help with a major party event at their house; they rented dishes and utensils for the weekend, and we used the automatic dishwasher to clean them before and after (before because of the dust from storage at the rental place).
I am immune to midnight panic attacks, simply becouse when I wake up at night (or in the morning) my mind just does not work. I can barely understand anyone, can’t speak and surely not able to write sensible blog posts.