February 13, 2005

The air in my dormitory here at Harding University is composed of, as a rough estimate, 64% dust. Normally, I wouldn't notice something like this. Normally, I am so oblivious that it might take me several minutes to an hour to notice having been shot. ("Hey, Chris, no offense, but there's an exit wound the size of a manhole in your shoulder." "What? Really? Crap! Why didn't you say something earlier?!") But some friendly person-who-is-probably-my-roommate scrawled a provocative message in the dust over my monitor ("Hi!" it reads, provocatively), so I couldn't help but notice, for the first time since I've been here, how much dust is on absolutely everything in the dorm.

Right now I am looking at big poofs of dust sitting in the far nether-regions of my desk behind the monitor, fluttering gently in the air-conditioning breeze as if they were indigenous plant life or something, all complacent and self-satisfied. After all, they know there is a higher chance that they will be consumed in the flames of a meteoroid impact than they will be swept off the desk by me. Dust bunnies don't get this complacent naturally, you know. They learn. They're probably having some kind of party right now, probably celebrating Lent. It's a lint Lent party. (Forgive me.)

Speaking of Lent, what's the deal with being able to go back on your commitment on Sundays? Growing up in the Church of Christ , I've had it on good authority that Sundays are supposed to be miserable. I suppose you might reason that, therefore, Sundays of all days need the happiness of going back on a religious commitment, but what about Mondays? As bad as Sundays are, what with all the getting up early and the doing of all the homework you put off all weekend, Mondays are even worse. And, also, it seems kind of cheap to not have to stay solidly on your giving-up all Lent long.

A few weekends ago, me and my friends on the Boston church plant team* decided to fast for three days. We were planning to have a retreat that weekend, and we thought that, to get our minds the right place, meaning bitterly dreaming of food, we should fast. Some of the people on the team have questioned the value of fasting, but I think I understand it. The idea is to punish yourself to make yourself feel holy without actually doing anything good for anyone. No, wait, that's silly. The idea is to teach yourself discipline and focus on spiritual matters.

So I appreciate Lent, provided it's actually undertaken with any measure of spiritual sincerity. So I think I might try some Lent this year. However, it's already been going on for a while. More specifically, according to my suitemate who has given up television, it's already been going on eight hundred million years, so I should probably choose to give up something that I've already been judiciously refraining from. So I've decided to give up washing the dishes for Lent.

(Notice how I pulled the discussion back on topic. Give me props. You know you want to.)

I practically never do the dishes. I never had to at home. I never knew why until, one day, after having "done my own dishes" at college for a year or so, I decided to wash up after a particularly atrocious cooking experiment attempting to recreate a Peruvian dish without the benefit of Peruvian ingredients. I washed everything and left it to dry, only to come upon my mother, a few minutes later, redoing them. She said not to worry, she didn't mind, but I couldn't help but feeling silly. No wonder she never made us kids do any chores. She just knew she'd have to do it all over again to get it done right!

This didn't stop when I moved to Cone with a certain suitemate whose name I will spell backwards to protect his anonymity. You see, Nahtan is really big into having clean dishes all the time so that, and this is just really unreasonable, he can "eat off of them from time to time." And when he likes them clean, he doesn't mean, evidently, "dipped under tepid dishwater and placed back in the cabinet," he seems to mean "cleared of visible mold colonies." So when I actually do the dishes, usually out of a feeling of intense guilt, Nahtan has to stop me to give me this big lecture on how it's not good enough that the crusted marinara is clean blah blah it has to be scraped off and all these little pointless minutiae and it drives me nuts. And in the end, he's spent more energy correcting my mistakes than it would take to just do the dishes himself.

My reluctance to do the dishes occasionally reaches unhealthy extremes. No plates left in the cabinet? No problem! A slightly used cutting board or popcorn popper will do the trick! Or your ethics textbook! No room in the sink for additional dirty dishes or textbooks? That's why we have a kitchen floor, isn't it?

(Just so you know, I'm exaggerating here. Somewhat. Don't get your panties in a ruffle.)

You should be proud of me, though, that at present there are only 4 relatively empty drink cans on my desk. Earlier this morning, there were 18. Earlier this week, there were 38 (I am not making this up.) My roommate has created a series of photographs of a stuffed cow ascending the pile of Sprite cans like a mountain climber. But today, I bit the bullet and threw them all away. Now, I know I should have recycled them, but if you go to the Cone dorm recycle bin and look inside, you will see (I am still not making this up) that the bin is FULL TO THE BRIM OF MY SPRITE CANS. It hasn't been emptied since the start of the semester.

So, anyway, now that the Sprite cans are gone, I can see the dust colonies (about to hold a dust revolution, it would seem). So everything has a downside. And I think I'm done with this C-File. Later.

* See www.bostonchurchplant.com, which I will hopefully be renovating soon to reflect the important decisions we have made as a team, most importantly the decision to go with beige over blue on our website.