Why are quarantine dirty dishes so much worse than regular dirty dishes?

I looked at the sinkful—nay, entire KITCHENFULL—of dirty dishes and thought: “I can’t.”

That’s when the little Peppy Cheerleader in my brain popped up and said: “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right!” Then she did a round off and shouted GO TEAM! I wanted to slap her.

I’m not just waging a war against dirty dishes. I’m waging war against Peppy Cheerleaders in my brain. Also the Harbingers Of Doom in my brain. During the day my brain (on meds) works super hard to pump out cheerful updates and lots of EVERYTHING WILL BE FINES but at night my meds go off duty and there are nightmares. The worst possible scenarios of Covid-19 death and destruction. I wake up gasping for air.

But the reality is, my day-to-day life in quarantine is very slow and uneventful. My main occupation is feeding the hungry hoards and then washing their plethora of dirty dishes. Oh, and washing my hands. This is my life now. I cook, I clean, I wash my hands. Sometimes I shave my legs. But not often.

Today I didn’t dress for the day. This is not good. I’ve been meticulous about dressing for the day. Nothing fancy. I’m not wearing jeans (not sure I’ll ever go back, tbh). There are no blouses or button-downs in this equation. I’m talking yoga pants and T-shirts. But at least it’s not my pajamas. Well, I mean. They ARE pajamas in the sense that I could sleep in them and sometimes do, but they are different pajamas than the ones I wear at night. I’m always careful about changing out of my Night Pajamas and into my Official Quarantine Outfits. Yoga pants and T-shirts. Barefeet. In other words, if I wore it at night, I can’t wear it during the day. This is the rule. Except, today I broke the rule. I wore my Day Pajamas to bed and then I didn’t change out of them this morning. I’m wearing the same pajamas I wore yesterday and I’m not mad about it.

Back to the dishes. Why are quarantine dishes so much worse than regular dirty dishes? I think I have an idea. It’s because there are MORE of them. The quantity of quarantine dishes is blasphemous. It’s wrong. It’s eco-unfriendly. It’s wrong how many glasses my children use to drink water. I tell them they should use one glass and then re-use it for the next drink of water. But no, they use another clean cup. I, myself, keep one cup by the fridge so that I can re-use it. But the children were not happy about this because they were like: “Is this a clean cup for me?” I would try to catch them in the act of stealing MY cup but it was pointless. My cup gets moved around everyday and so we’re all back to using a new clean cup for every drink of water and by the end of the day my kitchen looks like an elementary school cafeteria after lunch break. Dishes and cups everywhere. Mass disaster.

We are killing the planet. Everything is awful. And also, my back hurts. This does not make sense. Why does my back hurt? All I am doing is washing dishes. This is a tedious task but does not require a lot of back work. Or maybe it does. Who knows. Perhaps this is what we call Quarantine Back. It’s the back you get when you clean dirty dishes all day.

I’ve stopped watching the news. What is there to watch anyway. Nobody knows what they’re talking about and even so, everyone has an opinion. If I wanted that, I could just listen to my 12 year old twins argue about which Korean boy band is the best.

I stopped watching the news once I realized it was bad for my mental health. It only encourages the Harbingers of Doom and it makes my nightmares worse. No thanks. I mean, at the beginning of this whole lockdown situation I was watching the news everyday. I wanted to know things. I wanted to know all the things. But here’s the funny thing: you can’t. You don’t get to know. What you get is people repeating the same thing over and over 10 million times a day and then conspiracy theories seem valid just because they’re a different point of view.

I turned the TV off. I read a book I’ve read many times before because I knew how the story ended. I didn’t have to worry about it. I also watched movies for the 20th and 30th time for the same reason. I know how the story ends. I chose happy movies. I watched a lot of odd little BBC shows about “escaping to the country” where people wander around obscure little English villages and try to convince themselves that living in an 1760’s converted stage coach barn would be better than living in London with indoor plumbing. I watch this show because it’s relaxing to pretend that I, too, would like to live in a weird little cottage with squishy hallways and low ceilings. Because THOSE VIEWS. An English hillside. I’m tired of living in California. All this good weather. It’s so boring. Give me a real cracking British cottage with bad weather!

I think the dirty dishes have made me daffy. I’m back to blogging. Nobody saw that coming. Least of all me.

But here I am, tapping out a blog post and not editing it at all. Here’s the moral of the story: quarantine dirty dishes are so much worse than regular dishes because….they are happening during quarantine. Everything is worse in lockdown. You’re fighting for survival but also it’s incredibly boring. You didn’t expect that. You expected Harbingers of Doom and instead you’re just scraping day old teriyaki chicken off the 8x11 casserole dish you’ve used 20 times in the last two weeks. It’s a strange, confusing life and you are forgiven for doing fine and then suddenly and randomly totally freaking out. It’s weird. This whole thing is weird. But here I am writing about it.

I hope your pile of dirty dishes is less tall than mine and that you are somehow muddling through your days the best you can. I’ll be back soon with more tales of quarantine. For now, I must go run the dishwasher for only the second time today. Toodles.