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2001-06-14 | 5:37 p.m.

It's so hot. If you could hear me say this out loud, my voice would sound thick. I can't make myself do anything. We have an air conditioner, a window unit, but I never run it, even when the state is not buying ads on the radio urging everyone to use fans instead. We were already using fans. We've used the air conditioner so few times that I'm not sure it would work if I turned it on. If it were to get up over 102 degrees, I'd probably turn it on. Of course, on days like those, they really don't want you to use them, because everybody else is using theirs, too, and it sucks up all the juice and then we have rolling blackouts.

So what's the point? How come people in Florida get to use their air conditioners and we don't, when it's not as hot here? It doesn't seem fair. We just want to use ours once in a while. Down there, they leave 'em on all year round. And nobody even cares. Nobody feels guilty. I contain this huge annoying guilt about using big energy-suck appliances. I remind myself of Andie MacDowell in Sex, Lies, and Videotape. In the beginning of the movie, she's telling her therapist that she's worried about the garbage barge at sea that no country would allow in to dump its waste. (For my younger readers, this was an actual event that occurred around the time the movie was made.) She couldn't stop thinking about it. I remember reading some review that said this obsession of hers (oh, I'm not going to paraphrase this correctly, forgive me) obviously expressed her lack of sexual fulfillment. And my response to that was to think, Yeah, maybe, but I think she's also really worried about the barge. My own personal garbage barge takes the form of my stubborn refusal to use the dishwasher even though the dirty dishes stack up at a faster rate than that at which I wash them. It makes everybody mad at me, even me. But the dishwasher is hard on my dishes, hard on my flatware. It all comes out with little pock marks and spots. People tell me to use this Jet-Dry stuff, but it doesn't help. Everybody has an opinion on the subject.

Aside from the condition of the dishes, it wastes energy. I have known this forever. My Mom was over the other night and said, "Why don't you just use the dishwasher? It saves energy over washing dishes by hand."

I whirled on her and said, "It most certainly does not."

She fired back, icily, "Well, that's what I was told back when I was selling them. That was a sales point."

"Well, I could be wrong," I said in a voice that made clear I did not believe I was wrong. "But I would be very surprised to find out that's true. I will look it up."

That can't possibly be true, can it?

I just looked it up and the most definitive answer I can find from a non-biased source seems to be "it depends." Of course, some people just let the faucet run in between rinsing dishes, which makes my skin crawl, because I grew up during a drought. So I never do that. I can't do it. Compared to those people I've got to be on the lower end of the gallons used scale.

So should I start using the dishwasher? I don't know. Most of the sources I checked also recommended not rinsing the dishes before loading them. But that doesn't seem to work. It's supposed to work; it was one of the reasons we paid extra for this two-year-old Maytag dishwasher, but in practice it doesn't. Maybe if I used the highest wash setting, but then wouldn't that eliminate the water savings? I just can't fathom how it can be less wasteful to use a dishwasher that takes something like an hour-and-a-half to do a load of dishes. I get wild-eyed listening to the humming. "Isn't that thing done YET?"

I know what you're probably thinking. You're probably thinking I'm trying to tell you, surreptitiously, that I'm sexually frustrated. But no, I still think I'm just frustrated by the whole energy crisis dishwasher problem. And don't even get me started on the worldwide water crisis. I think I have an actual publishable essay in me about that.

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