A Cleaning Tool

Hi, it’s me, your kitchen on a random Thursday night. And yes, I am the perfect person–or, well, room–to pitch you on these earbuds.

But first, let me ask you something. How do I look?

I can tell by your grimace that the answer is not so great. Which leads us to a question initially posed by the great poet David Byrne:

And you may ask yourself
“Well… how did I get here?”

The answer is a mix of unchecked laziness and delusional ambition.

The laziness can be attributed to your inability to unload the dishwasher. You ran it a day or two ago, and now you’re using it as essentially additional storage space. Rather than putting the various cups, plates, bowls, and utensils where they belong, you simply retrieve whatever you need from the dishwasher itself.

The problem is you can’t contaminate the clean dishes in the dishwasher with dirty ones. As such, they have nowhere to go but the sink, piling up and making things difficult.

This, on its own, though, does not explain the severity of the situation. Which brings us to that delusional ambition I mentioned before.

You decided to try a new recipe, one that’s maybe slightly more complicated than your culinary skills are prepared to handle. Also, you didn’t read the whole recipe through before you started in order to make a plan of maximum efficiency. You mixed things in a small bowl at first, transferring to a bigger bowl only as you realized you were out of space. Or you measured wet ingredients before dry ingredients, so you couldn’t just reach your soy-sauce-soiled tablespoon into the sugar. And instead of washing it, you just threw them in the sink and grabbed your back-up set.

Now, the sink is not only full, but every one of my surfaces is covered with nasty dishes. Which means you find yourself again quoting our friend the great David Byrne:

And you may tell yourself
“This is not my beautiful house!”

Not because it is not your house, but because it is not beautiful.

Unfortunately, there is only one way to restore order. You get a pair of earbuds like these:

Then you put on a podcast or an audiobook or your favorite album, and you get to work. Maybe you leave one off, so you can interact with whoever else is there. Or maybe you put them both in and activate noise cancellation to focus.

Either way, order will soon enough be restored, and we’ll both forget all about this.

Until tomorrow night. And the night after that. And the night after–

Well, you get the picture.