Morning, Trash Rant

I was on time everyday this week but it was difficult, and I am very proud. I've tried to explain it a few times, but the Japanese just can't understand the concept of morning person vs. night owl. I explain, "I'm a night owl. I hate the mornings. In fact, I have to set three alarms spread all over the room, which I sometimes sleep through." "EEEEEEEEEEEHHH?" they say. They are amazed that on weeknights I will stay up until 2 A.M. just for the fun of it, or on weekends I will sleep until 2 P.M. because no alarm was set. Work schedules are run very tight, but apparently personal schedules are always exact as well...to bed at the same time at night, awake at the same time every morning, including weekends. Which is why sometimes I will get a ring on my doorbell at 9 A.M. on a Saturday morning. When this happens, I just stay in bed and don't respond, hoping to teach them a lesson. I hope this will help them understand the concept of a morning hater.

My night owl tendencies are at odds with the local trash schedules. Because of my rushed and last-minute morning routine, there is no time to take the burnable trash out on Monday and Thursday mornings because I have to walk a few minutes up the road, cross morning traffic on route 117 and place my meticulously separated garbage in a trash cage for pickup. Therefore I just build up huge piles of full trash bags on the balcony of my apartment until I can't take it anymore, and then I finally take the trash. But it's supposed to be done only in the morning and no one puts there garbage out at night except for me, and about once a month I'll do a special operations covert mission where after midnight I'll put on a dark hooded sweatshirt and toss all of the trash bags off my balcony to the parking lot Then I'll put my hood on and stealthily run up to the road with a load of trash, look both ways for possible witnesses, and quietly place my trash in the green cage. Now that the snow is melting it is harder to do because the walls of snow helped to conceal me. I usually have to make about 4 trips to get all my trash up there, and be careful to make sure anything I have from American products isn't showing through the bags so they won't know it's the local foreigner.

They are insane about their trash separation policies and I've heard of ALTs who didn't do their recycling/burnable trash right and actually had their trash bags opened or brought to school and inspected in front of the whole office. Because the recycling is more difficult to get away with at night and each material is given its own pickup day only once a month, I have been building up huge piles of newspaper/plastic/glass/aluminum/carboard/magazines in my shoe closet. However it is busting full now and I find myself occasionally making small inconspicuous trash missions to the local 7-11 to use their bins. I did make one morning recycling run last year with plastic bottles, but became discouraged when an old woman frowned at me and gave me a talkin' to for not taking the hard colored plastic caps off the all the clear plastic bottles the right way. So I gave up after that. And now my closets and balcony are becoming nearly unbearable with overflowing trash and recyclables. Sooner or later I'll just have to get out of bed and follow the trash schedule like a normal Japanese person.