Episode summary
Taco night stops when a bowl of rice goes down the disposal, and dinner waits while the sink comes apart. Two phrases for a mess you caused yourself, and for the hard work it takes to fix it by hand.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless.
If you’re new here, pull up a seat and grab a warm drink. If you’ve been here before, thanks for coming back for another cup. Have you ever made a mess and then had to clean it up yourself? I have, and recently.
Today’s phrase is for any problem that’s your own doing. The phrase is: you’ve made your bed, now lie in it. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.
The phrase is a long one, but that gives us a pretty clear image to look at. We’re going to look at it a little more literally. You’ve got a bed that you built from the ground up all by yourself. You picked the mattress, you put the frame together, you tucked in the sheets. Then night comes, and you have to sleep in it. If you built it well, great. If a screw is missing and one side sinks, it’s still the bed you’re sleeping in. Nobody else is going to take your place.
In English, we use the phrase “you’ve made your bed, now lie in it” to describe a situation you caused, so you’re the one who has to deal with the results.
Now, a quick word on what this phrase is not. It isn’t actually about the morning chore of making your bed, pulling the sheets straight and setting the pillows in place. It’s about consequences, and people often use it in a scolding tone, like “You deserve this, so stop complaining.” That’s not how I’m using it today. Today, it’s about ownership, not punishment.
Here’s one more everyday example. Say you volunteer to host dinner for ten friends at your apartment. When everyone goes home and the kitchen is full of dirty dishes, you made your bed. Now you gotta lie in it.
Recently, I had to become a plumber to fix a problem of my own creation.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, when I don’t work in the evening, Emma and I have agreed that I should take care of dinner. I’m still trying to get into the habit of doing it regularly, so my dinners aren’t very high quality at this point. I had an idea that might help. Set dinners, depending on the day. Tuesdays we do some form of tacos. Thursdays are some form of curry. Fridays are some variation of meat and potatoes. I have a preference for sweet potatoes, and we got a big bag of them a couple of weeks back, so this Friday will probably be meat, sweet potatoes, and some kind of vegetable. The evening I’m talking about today wasn’t a Friday. It was Tuesday. That means tacos. Taco Tuesday.
After picking Emma up from work at five and getting home, I got started on the meal. It was around five forty-five or six. I hadn’t put anything on the stove yet, because I was still in the early prep phase. We didn’t have a lot of variety in the ingredients we had on hand, but we did have eggs, so I decided I was going to make breakfast tacos. Rice, beans, and eggs, with spices and salsa to put on top.
I was washing the rice in the rice cooker bowl when calamity struck! I dropped the bowl. All of the uncooked rice went down the drain, and most of it was just sitting there in our garbage disposal. My hands are too big to reach into the sink drain and pull the rice out. I had to figure out another way to get to it, because I didn’t want that rice sitting in the pipes and ruining them.
A garbage disposal is a machine that grinds up food waste so that it can move through the pipes smoothly without getting clogged. I know it isn’t something every kitchen has around the world, but they come standard in American homes. When I lived in Japan, we had a net in the drain that caught leftover food so it never got washed down the pipes. The food stays in the net and you have to manually change it out. That took some getting used to, but it has its benefits. The net may have caught the majority of the rice if I had made the same mistake in Japan. Here, the rice was already past the opening, down in a machine I couldn’t reach with my fingers.
I may have inadvertently made that bed, but I still had to lie in it.
So we stopped. We focused on getting all of the rice out before I went back to cooking. Nothing was on the stove yet. I had only I had only just begun, so the meal could wait while the sink probably couldn’t. We put Eliana in her pack-and-play, the portable crib, and Emma pulled up our best friend ChatGPT. She gave me the instructions for how to take the piping apart and get into the garbage disposal. I asked her what to do next as I went, and she answered from what ChatGPT was telling her. Once she had given me enough to keep going, she spent a little more time keeping Eliana distracted and out of the kitchen.
I think it took at least an hour to take it apart and put it all back together. All we needed was a screwdriver and a bit of elbow grease. The pipes were connected by PVC connectors, the white plastic joints, and those could be turned by hand. The hardest piece was a metal lock connecting the garbage disposal to the sink. That one could be twisted off too, but only with a good amount of force. I’m still feeling a bit of soreness in my forearms from gripping it so tightly while I tried to turn it.
Once the disposal was off, I could see where the rice had gone. Almost all of it was still sitting in that first chamber, the part where the motor spins. Very little of it had gotten into the actual piping. I got a large bowl that we often use for cleaning, flipped the detached garbage disposal upside down, and shook it out into the bowl. Much of the rice fell out, but a lot of little pieces of rice were still stuck to the sides after the shaking. So, I got a water bottle with a squeezable top and squirted water into the disposal to wash the rest of the rice out into the bowl.
We still unscrewed and drained the P-trap. That’s the little U-turn in the pipe under the sink. It’s there to catch heavier, larger things before they run off into the rest of the building’s pipes. There wasn’t much rice in it. Opening it was still part of making sure we had actually cleared the mess.
That was also where the smell came from. It was mildly stinky, and it showed up after the pipes were disconnected. We live in a large apartment complex, and the pipes connect at various points throughout the building. I think what I was smelling was a mix of things other people had already washed down, wafting, meaning drifting through the air, up from wherever all of that ends up. It was a bit nauseating, but didn’t linger much after sealing everything back up.
After it was all back together, we ran a few tests. Nothing appeared to be leaking. Fingers crossed that stays true.
I didn’t cook more rice. I guess I just didn’t have the heart for another try that night. By the time we ate, it was probably seven thirty. We had egg and bean tacos. I mixed taco seasoning, some hot sauce, and a little bit of ranch, a creamy dressing, into the beans, and used that as the base. I laid the eggs over the top, then put on shredded sharp cheddar, a cheese with a strong flavor, and salsa. It was a surprisingly good meal for how terribly the preparation had gone.
When it was done, I wouldn’t say I discovered a new life’s calling in the noble art of plumbing repair, but there was a noticeable amount of satisfaction in having fixed the problem myself. The tacos were on the table. The sink was back in one piece. My forearms were sore, and the rice was in the garbage instead of in the pipes.
Which brings me back to those forearms. If you’d been standing in my kitchen, you’d have seen the moment the whole evening turned: me, gripping that metal lock with both hands, trying to twist the garbage disposal free from the sink. It didn’t want to move. I held on and turned until my forearms burned, and they were still sore hours later.
That kind of effort has a name in English. It’s called elbow grease. When we say elbow grease, we mean hard physical effort done by hand. It’s the twisting, the scrubbing, the pulling, the pushing. It’s what you use when the job needs your muscles more than it needs your brains.
The name might be a bit confusing. Elbow grease isn’t a product. You can’t buy a can of it at the hardware store, however much it sounds like something you could. And it isn’t a skill, either. I didn’t come up with some novel plumbing technique to fix pipes with strategic use of my elbow. The grease is sweat, and it’s readily available with some effort.
The sink is back in one piece. The tacos hit the table around seven thirty: egg and bean, with sharp cheddar and salsa on top. They turned out pretty delicious for having one of the three main ingredients relegated to the trash.
So here’s my question for you. What’s a mess of yours that you had to handle yourself, and what kind of effort did you need to put in to get it fixed? Did you need to get a little greasy, or just take responsibility and lie down in that bed?
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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