Thursday, July 30, 2009

Collecting trash

Since I moved into Boston I started to see homeless people and beggars almost everywhere. Clearly this is the place to be in if you are desperate. Thanks god a situation I am far from, for now. But not so much to not persuade me to get interested on a couch I saw on the street.

Thursday is the day the trash gets collected at night in Cambridge. People put out their bins, their recycling boxes and the furniture they don't want anymore. Someone put out a nice couch and I could not help being attracted to it. The feel of shame was overwhelming. Who would ever go and pick up a couch abandoned on the street ready to be picked up by the trash master?

I have lived in my new home for about a month and I have left about a month in the same place. In September I will move to a nicer place which I already like a lot. People are friendly and clean there and the location is ideal to go to work by bus. But where I am now, people are dirty and careless about the house. The couch is broken and the house overall is left to rot. I cleaned the other day and I ended up thinking that the main reason the people living in this place sublet the house in the summer is that so they get some cleaning once a year. No kidding. Well, also, the subletters from last summer must have not done a god job.

So, I thought, what makes me really think that the couch in my house is worse than the one in the street? Pretty much nothing. That said, I went and picked the couch off the street with the help of a friend. This should make the living room bearable for the month of August, until I finally leave this place. I can just hope that now I will not start looking for food in the trash bin, with the excuse that it will be only until the end of August. Gulp!