So I enter Wal-Mart needing a treat for the younger girls’ book club. Option A, appearing on our right as we enter the store: Pre-made St. Patrick’s Day mini cupcakes, $2.50 a dozen. Probably need two. Problem solved, at a cost of $5.
Option B: Replenish our sugar supply and make our own cupcakes. Cost: $2.12, plus labor.
It’s the murkiness of the labor cost that complicates the equation. It was already 8 p.m. as we stood in the store Tuesday night, weighing our options. Opening the kitchen bakery would keep us up ‘til 10, by the time we got the mess cleaned up, or else require an early morning shift. The Wal-Mart cupcakes wouldn’t even need to be carried in from the van. They could spend the night in the back, and be ready to go in the morning.
But then we’d still be out of sugar.
We took a vote. The sugar, radiating magnetism even when unadorned, won -- on the condition that everybody pitch in.
And they did. Ben mixed up the batter, I mixed up the icing, and the girls frosted and sprinkled green sugar while I started cleanup. That one batch of a white cake recipe made two dozen mini cupcakes, one dozen regular cupcakes and we still had leftover batter and frosting for some future snack. Not to mention all that sugar.
I could run the numbers to prove the superiority of this DIY project, but I think the real benefit, in addition to the teamwork exercise, was that ... it forced me to actually wash the dishes. By hand.
I’ve gone for long stretches in my adult life without a dishwasher, and I don’t really mind doing dishes under those conditions. But there’s something about the presence of a dishwasher that puts me into factory-worker mode -- rinse, load, start machine. Unload, always in the same order, stack items, always in the same place. Repeat sequence again and again and again. Reminds me of the summer I worked in a pretzel plant as a teenager.
Washing dishes, on the other hand, is an exercise in problem solving. It uses a different part of your brain. And while it’s not something I abhor, I do find it hard to flip the switch between these two mindsets. So as long as the factory workers tending the industrial device keep everything moving along the assembly line, we cram everything into the dishwasher. But when there’s a breakdown in the process -- like the other night, when we already had a sinkful of dishes to feed the dishwasher before we started in on cupcake production -- it‘s time to flip the switch.
I’d forgotten how satisfying it can be to clean a plate by hand, to loosen up the accumulated detritus of a meal and scrub it away. If there really is some kind of zen connection between what goes in on your physical environment and what goes on between your ears, what happens if most of your daily household tasks are those of an automaton, tending various machines that suck the crap off soiled clothes, dishes and flooring surfaces? What about the complex congealed configurations that defy the machine? Do we just keep feeding them back in, hoping for better results next time?
All I know is, my mind felt quieter after scrubbing those dishes than it does after I feed the beast. The girls were awfully proud of their cupcakes, much more so than if we'd come bearing tiny cakes in plastic clamshells.
And now that CBS Sports’ won’t let me log in to make my last-minute March Madness picks, I’m gonna have to fill out the brackets that came in the newspaper. By hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment