So, you've cooked a meal. Maybe it was chicken cordon bleu, maybe it was mac and cheese, but you're left with the same problem: cleaning up after yourself. Cleaning generally sucks, but perhaps nothing sucks more than cleaning up the aftermath of a home-cooked meal. In fact, cleaning dishes has caused more and bloodier heartbreak than any other domestic chore. I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court has ruled that having suffered a family member's refusal to clean up after meals for more than one year provides a reasonable excuse for 2nd Degree murder. You'll be putting away food, washing dishes, and cleaning countertops, all of which are pretty bad. However, here's some protocol for making it all easier. Ok, not easier, but at least more bearable, and maybe more efficient. Whether you're just cleaning up a bowl of cereal or a feast of Fiestaware, keep some things in mind.

Do It Now
I know that as soon as you're done eating, you don't really feel like cleaning. You feel like sitting in your little healthy, full, carb-induced coma and relaxing. Or, I do anyway. But, I recommend not letting dirty dishes sit. This comes from experience. Lots of experience. Things grow on food. Bad things. Coffee left out will be able to move about on its own after about a week, and after two it will be arguing the finer points of existentialism with you as you try to dump it into the sink. Wine and beer will travel farther into the realms of fermentation than fruit or yeast really should after 5 days. Pasta will undergo a magnificent alchemistic change where the matter of the noodles will actually metamorphose into mold. And if you've left meat out for more than 3 days, just throw away the dish. If you don't have the constitution to do all of the dishes at once, then don't. Get the nasty stuff out of the way first, and leave some of the rest for later. There are things that should be completed in one sitting without taking a break, like eating sushi, watching a baseball game, and having sex. However, you wouldn't sit down to read “Moby Dick” in one marathon stretch, so if the task of cleaning the kitchen is as epic as Melville’s oeuvre, then pace yourself. If you've put in a CD, work for the length of the CD then stop. Just get the aforementioned foods cleaned up before you stop, because it will be really, really ugly next time if you don't.

Make It Suck Less
You're already going to be unhappy dealing with the mess, so set a counterattack against pissiness. Don't wear your day clothes for the job. Get some sweats or crank the heat a bit so you can wear a tee shirt or something; just wear anything you're not going to mind getting dirty and you're going to be comfortable in. Then, rock. Turn on some music (TV's no good -- you'll have to take your eyes off the job and it'll go all pear-shaped from there). Play some big beat, some rock, some show tunes, whatever you like (although, if you listen to show tunes, then you probably won't be able to get your roommates to help you). Do not, under any circumstances, listen to the news while doing dishes. You will only get angry and break shit. The point is to get some tunes you can move to.

Don't Waste Time Mourning: Organize
Organization is key for doing dishes. If the sink is too full to even wedge in a sponge, then take stuff out. Pile the stuff that can wait elsewhere, and work on the most pressing stuff later. Dedicate a clean dish for holding soapsuds to dip into while you work so you won't have to keep adding Premium Dish Washing Liquid™ to the sink. Have a plan. If you get to the point where you have both hands buried in old pasta sauce, holding back the avalanche of coffee mugs from tumbling into the sink with your elbow, and you actually need to use your mouth to spurt more soap into the fray to finish, you're doomed. It’s time to scrap the project and buy plastic ware.

A Clean Kitchen Embiggens The Smallest Chef
The last bit of advice I have for attacking the aftermath of a good cooking session is to make sure the areas that you cook on are clean before you go to bed. If you leave everything a mess, it will actually dissuade you from cooking tomorrow. One lazy moment of cleaning procrastination could lead to a week of take-out food and Pringles. Home-cooked food is so gratifying that it's a shame to ruin the experience because you have to make space on the counter with a spatula to cook in the first place, after which you have to eat off of paper towels because all of your plates have congealed into one mutant mass in the sink. Anyway, chicks dig a clean kitchen -- it's worth a bit of effort.