The People of State College Part Six: My Apartment Mate

I am sharing an apartment in State College. It is a two bedroom apartment that is designed for five people but over the Summer there are just two of us. My apartment mate is very tiny. She is very attractive for a girl. I make efforts to be friendly whenever I talk to her. I don't talk to her often because we have little in common...

For example:

She really likes to throw things away. I think everybody gets pleasure from throwing certain things away. Things that definitely belong in the trash like Adam Sandler films and old college friends. But she throws everything away.

Mostly what bothers me is the food. She buys lots of food and then doesn't eat it. A few weeks later she throws it away. This morning she took down a bag of bananas that had been on top of the fridge for a week or two. "Oh, I forgot about these," she said. "They're not any good now. I'll make something with them later." She said this for my benefit. What she meant was "Oh, I forgot about these. I'll put them back on top of the fridge for now. By this afternoon I will have forgotten about them again. In a week I'll buy a new bag of bananas and throw this bag away." So I swiped one. It tasted like alcohol.

She's like an anti-bum (or maybe an anti-Richard). Instead of removing things from the trash she places things in it. Maybe growing up her parents owned a garbage company. When she was a little girl they would send her to spend the night at friends' houses. "When everyone's asleep," they would tell her, "Take these metal weights and place them in each trash bin." Her parents garbage business was amazingly successful and she became hooked on the act of filling trash bags.

Or maybe they had her place valuables in the trash. She would mark the trash bag and later they could easily retrieve it. They would sell off fine china and famous paintings. They would become disgustingly rich but her young mind would never develop an understanding of what actually constituted trash. She would then spend years throwing different objects away. An experiment of sorts on her part. "Does this bag of bread seem out of place in this trash bin?"

I don't want any reader to get the wrong idea. She's very nice and an incredibly easy person to share an apartment with. Her and I just view the purpose of a trash can differently.

P.S. My building has a trash shoot! This is a very cool contraption which one throws trash into. When I buy a house it is going to be loaded with shoots and other contraptions. A laundry shoot, a dumbwaiter, and, now that I know about it, a trash shoot.