project 365 #289: kitchen

project 365 #289: kitchen
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

In a fit of angst and housewifelyness last night, I came home from the laundromat and bar and cleaned the kitchen up, finally, from the detritus of Saturday night's dinner party and, worse, Sunday's Day of Sloth (tm.) Then I changed the camera batteries and took a grudging picture of the day, which you see before you in all its glory. That's my kitchen. It's an awful kitchen and I tell it so regularly, which is a big mistake, because it retaliates by repeatedly clonking me on the head whenever I become unwary. There are a lot of cabinets in this kitchen, inconveniently placed, badly designed and just plain crazy. It is amazing how one discovers, whenever one moves, that whoever just moved out of the house one is moving into was in fact batshitinsane. Inevitably they put hooks in places no sane human would ever put them, organized their pathetically wrong closets in terrible Lovecraftian ways and, worst of all, clearly spent years existing with kitchens so evil, any normal person would have run screaming out of the house.

However, this particular normal person cannot, of course, afford to run screaming, so she stands in the kitchen and screams. It doesn't seem to faze the kitchen much. In the spirit of kitchens, therefore, I have decided to offer you some helpful household hints. They are very helpful. They will make you all Martha Stewartesque and godly although, in the immortal, paraphrased, slightly remembered words of Tom Robbins, if, by this time in human history, godliness isn't next to something a damn sight more interesting than cleanliness, we're all doomed.

Household Hints for the Hapless

1. You only need one eggplant. It doesn't matter how many people you're planning to feed - 5? 15? 73? - just back away from that second eggplant right now. One is enough. More, actually, than enough.

2. Those Mr. Clean Magic Eraser things? They work. It's too bad that they're filled with toxic chemicals that are reducing the life of the planet by visible increments, not to mention shortening your own, personal life every time you inhale (and you had better plan on wearing gloves, too, unless you want to truly understand what the Victorian novelists meant when they talked about housemaid's hands) but fuck it, they work.

3. Cucumber peels do not repel cockroaches. That is some kind of stupid ass hippie myth, and while we're at it, white vinegar does not clean everything in your house. If white vinegar cleaned everything in your house, Mr. Clean and his freakish white eyebrows and his daring earring would never have had to come over to visit and a giant industry of toxic household cleansers would never have been born. Vinegar is a hippie myth, like Tiger Balm, which doesn't, by the way, cure headaches. The only thing vinegar really does is cure sunburn and make everything smell like cheap salad; these are good qualities and I'm not knocking them, but fuck trying to clean stuff with it. I, personally, would like to finish cleaning the house before 2012 and for that you need Mr. Clean. Or bleach. Or both.

4. There is no four tonight - I'm tired and I'm not entirely done with the stack of cheap detective novels I got from Downtown Books and News last Friday. Therefore, you will have to come up with number four all by yourself. Hint: decoupage.