Except for one house we lived in that had a janky old dishwasher I didn’t trust to do a good job and not break my dishes (so I never used it), I’ve just never had one. It’s been hand-washing dishes for me since I was a tween and that was my daily chore for our household of six.
Anyway … I’m almost fifty now. Still hand-washing dishes. Still hating it.
It helps for me to find gratitude and beauty in washing the dishes where I can: a background of sunshine making the stream of water sparkle coming out of the tap, steam rising from a hot tub of soapy water, etc. Today my gratitude for having to hand-wash dishes comes from my love of fountain pens and my relative newness to the game of collecting fancy bottled inks.
I splurged on an expensive bottle of special-interest ink: Golden Beryl, Pelikan’s 2021 Ink of the Year. It went on sale a few days ago at Goldspot.com along with the Golden Beryl pen for their weekly dip. As always in my experience with Goldspot, my entire order arrived unexpectedly fast, BEFORE it was even projected to arrive, so I unboxed the whole thing yesterday (yeah, you know I bought enough stuff to qualify for free shipping, so my box had a lot of goodies to spend the afternoon with).
I saved playing with the super-luxe gold shimmer ink until last, so I guess I wasn’t patiently attending to all of the details that I should’ve when I put the cap back on the gorgeous Edelstein bottle; it didn’t want to screw on more than a half turn. I thought I might’ve just put it on crooked so I tried again, and same deal … seemed tight enough though and didn’t LOOK crooked so I put it back in the pretty box (I even re-placed the protective little foam bumpers included just for shipping because I wanted to keep it as pristine and complete as possible in case I make a video revisiting unboxing but also because I’m a weird hoarder who loves packing materials).
ANYHOO, I went back to playing with my haul of seven new fountain pens, two bottles of ink, two new-to-me kinds of paper, and assorted new-colors-to-me cartridges. Almost an hour later when I started clearing the clutter from this special delivery off of my desk, I felt WETNESS in my hand as I carried the Edelstein Golden Beryl box over to my ink-bottle shelves. Uh-oh!
So yeah … I just failed to screw the cap on properly. Now the box-bottom is warped and stained because it got filled with maybe a teaspoon or possibly even a whole tablespoon of ink. The mess was pretty well-contained (it didn’t drip all over my desk or the floor or my clothes) but there was quite a bit to clean and wipe off, so my fingers got very stained with greenish-golden-yellow.
Definitely an expensive mistake to make, and one that I don’t yet fully know the consequences of. I lost fluid off the top of the bottle, so I don’t think I lost any shimmer, but that means the ratio of liquid-mixy components to gold shimmery particles is no longer as intended; you’d think extra higher shimmer-to-juice ratio would be AWESOME, but this ink already has a reputation for being problematic because of its unheard-of super-high shimmer levels. Could it be that there will just be way too much golden grit in the ink mix for it to flow now? Guess I will find out …
The good news is I didn’t try to shake the bottle with the cap not-screwed-on-straight; now THAT would have been a messy golden nightmare! Still, my hands looked quite jaundiced from all the yellow soaking into my fingerpads and skin.
This morning, though, my hands and fingers look their regular shade of pink, white and freckles. CLEAN. All because I had to wash dishes by hand to get ready for dinner between my mess-making and waking up this morning.
Thinking about this brings into focus how these mundane analog chores can be beautiful sensual rituals, and how much beauty and pleasure and benefit we get out of doing the cleaning and preparation (and break-down) portions of our jobs, hobbies and life. How big the payoff is, being able to wake up and have a clean counter, clean hands, a clean mug set out for your first cup of tea or coffee. Clean syringes, clean empty cartridges, freshly loaded pens to write your morning pages with.
My motto for PleasureWriting.com is “Write More, Clean Less”. I still feel very committed to that as a set of priorities and a promise to potential fountain pen newbs, but as I grow my collection and take my hobby of pleasure writing to the next levels, I accept that there is naturally going to be more mess and more cleaning than in the first twenty years of my fountain pen habit use that was limited to one kind of pen (Parker Vectors) and one kind of ink “filling” system (Parker’s proprietary cartridges). While it’s possible to very happily stay in that kind of a simple groove with super easy-to-maintain pens and inks, I get so much pleasure from COLORS. I’m at the point now of embracing mess-making as even more than a necessary side-effect of using more and different pens and filling them from all kinds of different bottled inks, sample vials and cartridges; I actually ENJOY little spills as opportunities to play with ink and get to know it outside of a pen, off of paper, while it’s still wet. If that leads me to have more gratitude for a chore I struggle to get through every day: all the better.
Have you ever made a mess with ink? How do you feel about getting wet and messy?