I have very nice parents. One of the many little perks of that is that I never had to do dishes throughout my teenage years. It was only after that that they started to get fed up and started dish-washing schedules that included me. So one day of the week was my day to do the dishes. This schedule stuck for maybe two months, tops.
See, I take a very long time doing dishes. It always frustrates me when dishes are put back in the drawer that aren't perfectly clean, so I was especially thorough with each and every piece of silverware. Every spot needed to be scrubbed. My parents told me I was wasting too much water, that it shouldn't be taking me so long, but I wasn't going to do the kind of job they do. And understand, I do not enjoy washing dishes at all. This wasn't a point of pride, just a point of obsession. Each time I washed the dishes, I was standing at that sink for well over two hours.
Eventually I squirmed my way out of doing the dishes again. Then my mother started to get angry. She said it wasn't fair that I should use dishes and she'd have to wash them. She suggested that rather than having a schedule, we should all just wash our own dishes.
So from that point on, I've been eating on plastic. Plastic plates, plastic cups. I still use real silverware, because the plastic silverware is borderline unusable. But if there's a way to not leave a dish, I don't leave a dish. That way my mother can't justifiably get angry at me for giving her work that she wanted me to do. There's no work now.
From the start I understood the downside of this policy, which is that it limits the food I can eat. I can't cook anything, even pasta, because then there would be pots or pans left. So for months now I've been on an exclusive diet of bagels and whatever leftover pasta is around, but that's barely a change from before so I'm okay with it. I don't need variety, I just need to eat.
As I said I've been doing this for months, but it was very recently that my father found out that I'd been microwaving the plates. Well, of course I microwave the plates. The bagels need to be defrosted before toasting, and I need to melt cheese on the pasta. When I'm having pasta, I sometimes microwave it over and over. I didn't realize, until my father told me, that that's not healthy. He told me that microwaving plastic gets some sort of toxic material into the food which has been proven to cause cancer.
Well, gee. I wish he had told me that before I was microwaving my food in them twice a day every day for months. He assured me that there's no way I could get cancer already, but I don't see how he's so certain. I've stopped microwaving the plates, of course. For pasta I use actual dishes, which I'm not going to wash afterward. I'm going to eat pasta less.
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