Intern Chick

Time flies when you're hauling garbage from your new apartment to the side of your mom's house.



Two weeks ago I made my first trip to "the apartment." I came with 4 of my friends and my mother, armed with a granny cart full of Fantastik, Clorox, Lysol, 4 pairs of rubber gloves, sponges, buckets, pledge, etc. We split up into teams, one team tackled the bathroom and the other got started on the kitchen. You can imagine how small a kitchen and bathroom can be in an apartment in New York. It took all day. Since I am cleaning out the whole apartment and can't throw the garbage away in the basement, I've been loading it up into my mother's car and then unloading it on the side of the house.

After that first weekend, I couldn't convince any of my friends to come back. My mom and I went Saturday morning and spent 12 hours on the bedroom alone. We dusted light fixtures, scrubbed the windows, polished furniture, sorted through costume jewelry, and threw out loads and loads of useless crap (I'm convinced that when you turn 65, it is a rite of passage to begin a collection of plastic bags that are at least 10 years old). The car was stuffed to the brim with garbage bags and Sunday morning I added them to the pile collecting on the lawn. Sunday night my mom and I went back to take more garbage. We loaded up a granny cart with a few bags, and I carried three out to the street. We stopped for a moment to rest, and the cart started rolling down the street. I ran after it and we tried to collect ourselves despite the flock of people walking by staring at us in disbelief. It took us three tries to bring the garbage to the car, after many attempts at stacking it every which way and it toppling over every time. The end result was me running bags back and forth amid confused stares from passersby. My favorite was the trip where my mom carried a bag with a bright orange pool noodle popping out the front and I paraded down the street with an enormous ebony carving of African elephants and a Hoover vacuum circa 1950. Bag after bag we carried, into the steamy hours of that Sunday night. You cannot fathom how much crap an 85 year old woman can aquire in her lifetime. Some if the things are gems, just waiting to be uncovered. Unfortunately, most of it is crap. We arrived home and proceeded to add more garbage to that ever growing pile.

That night, I dreamed (or should I say nightmare-ed) of the pile of crap growing on the side of the house. Garbage at a barbeque. Garbage at work. Garbage in the rain. Garbage. Crap. More garbage, more crap.

At this point, you just have to laugh, or else the crap will kill you.