It Will Take You Two Minutes to Read This

Things simply do not take as long as you think they do....

Case in point: My most despised household chore, bar none, is emptying the dishwasher.

ARGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

I'm not really sure why this is. It's a relatively innocuous event--mundane and stultifying but not more so than pulling clothes out of a dryer, de-mildewing tiles in the shower or, even, filling the dishwasher yet it fills me with ennui and despair intense enough to cause me to ignore it for days.

I am famous, within certain (very small) circles for hand washing dishes just to avoid unloading what's already in there.

Maybe it's because it involves bending. I've never been a fan of bending. Or reaching, for that matter and unloading the dishwasher involves lots of bending and reaching...also nesting crockery, handling flatware, opening and closing cabinet doors. In other words, it's a unbearable nightmare.

When Charlie still lived here, it was his job, poor thing. Once he escaped left, I would beg Seth to do it but even I cannot justify asking a man who drives the hours he does and works as hard as he does to take over a simple kitchen chore.

The good news is that after forcing myself to do it this morning, I timed it and it only took 4 minutes. I can power through 4 minutes of almost anything*, yes?

Timing things has become a new habit. Perhaps it's a sign of encroaching psychological issues, maybe even a touch of OCD but I now know that the red light I flip out about about on North Street is only 14 seconds (literally) in duration...that I only stood on line at Shop Rite yesterday for a mere 6 minutes (giving me time to thumb through the National Enquirer and carefully monitor the cellulite of the stars) and the time it took to bundle the papers for recycling was a mere 3 minutes, 17 seconds.

 

Speeding through such torture gives me more time to sit -- blood pooling in my lower extremities and increasing the likelihood of stroke -- yet laughing gleefully at such web sites as iwastesomuchtime.com** and icanhas.cheezburger.com. 

Please don't tell people this about me. It's embarrassing.

*except waterboarding
**Thanks to Stajie for recently introducing me to this brilliant site.