Lunch Matters

I am a well-meaning, helpful individual, and yet it is very important that I not touch your sink.

As I write this, my roommate’s cat has climbed into the sink to eyeball a forest of glassware currently drying on a field of paper towels. She wants very badly to jump toward it and, because she is an unaccomplished jumper, slip on the towels and bring the whole thing crashing down upon her. I have work to do today, and work is rarely abetted by broken glass and a bloodied cat. I must move her.

Now, as I was saying—shit, she’s looking at the glasses again. If I don’t put them away I’ll never be able to relax. Damn it. I hate when that cat pushes me around.

Now. AS I WAS SAYING!—Having completed that feline-forced task, my coffee is room temperature and my toast is too cold to butter easily. I’m going to have to tear it apart to get any on there at all. It’s the little things that make life unnavigable.

All right. And so. I was never intending to write a three paragraph dissertation on the hellish difficulty of living with a sneaky cat.

Say—the toast wasn’t as cold as I thought. I just realized, though, that I’m eating the end piece. Oh well.

Those asides weren’t meant to be cute. They simply intruded, unwanted, into my train of thought, which was designed originally to tell the story of how, last week, I broke the sink that THE FUCKING CAT has climbed back into again. Whatever. There’s nothing in there she can break.

Unless, of course, she is as stupid as me.

I was preparing to fix dinner last week—green bean casserole and Greek zucchini fritters—when I noticed that my sink was full. I set upon them quickly, because it was already 7:30, and slowly the sink began to fill with water. I plunged my hand through the opaque dish-slime to clear the drain blindly, but failed. The problem went deeper. There is a chamber underneath the grate but above the actual drain where food has gotten lodged before. I decided to wait until the sink had drained—slowly over the course of the meal—before attempting to clear that space.

As my fritters fritted and green beans casseroled, mess consumed the kitchen. I surrounded myself with dirty dishes until they formed a nearly full circle, making me feel like a greasier, less talented Neil Peart. And still the sink did not drain. Finally more afraid of a messy kitchen than suspicious dishwater, I dipped a screwdriver into the abyss, hoping to remove the drain’s cap, fish out whatever was in there, and let the water flow out.

I succeeded. Sort of. As it happens, what I had imaged as the “drain’s cap” is actually the “strainer body.” From what I understand—and if this post has taught you anything it should be that I understand everything about sinks—by loosening the body I did the same to the locknut, which would not be a problem except that between the two lie the rubber gasket that performs the vital task of making sure that three or four gallons of muck never run out of my sink and on to my floor.

But as the water gushed out, a wonderful thing occurred. No one—not even me—realized it was my fault. My roommate and I squealed like teenagers, rushing for towels and cursing the bastards who installed our sink. All we knew was that it had been broken all night. This new nightmare was only an extension of the old non-draining brokenness.

We spent twelve hours the next day waiting for the plumber, my Neil Peart dish-museum still spread around our living space. With a few turns of the screwdriver he corrected my blunder, and tottered back out into the world.

Even then no one suspected me, but I owned up, too amused by my own stupidity to keep it to myself. I’m just a good guy like that.

Incidentally, we’re looking for someone to house sit our cat over Thanksgiving.