Friday, May 13, 2016

Adulting Wins to Be Proud Of: Putting the Trash Out on Time

There was a time, when I was young and the world was new, when I could never manage to put the trash out on time. Sure, I managed to sort the recycling and put the non-recyclables into the big green curbside bin provided me by the city. The part I consistently failed at was the part where I was supposed to drag that bin to the curb on the designated morning of the week so that the trash man could come and collect its festering contents. Fortunately, it was a big bin and it could hold like two months’ worth of my trash, so this wasn’t as much of an issue as it might at first appear.

Then, there was another time, when I was not so young and the world was getting on a bit, that I didn’t have curbside pickup because I lived in an apartment building in France where I was expected to perform the herculean task of carrying my trash down the hall and putting it in a bin in the rubbish room. Circumstances at that time were such that I was regularly far too overwhelmed to tackle that oppressive chore, so I lived with a pile of trash in the kitchenette of my not-quite-200-square-foot (17 sq m) studio apartment.

“You’re going to get rats,” somebody almost certainly said to me at some point.

“It’s okay, I have a cat,” I almost certainly replied.

But now that I’m old and the world is just falling apart, I get up every Tuesday morning to put out my trash before the trash man comes at 9:00 a.m. to collect it. As far as Kitchen Trash Pile Me was concerned, 9:00 a.m. may as well have been the middle of the night, but she didn’t know how I would swell with pride upon seeing that bag of trash fly into the back of the garbage truck every week.