CUTstuff... my first & only chore.

Starting when I was five, it was my job to collect the garbage from the tiny trash cans around the house. Daily. This was an excruciating and humiliating task for a five-year-old girl, so I had to use my already brilliant sense of creativity and wonder to make it tolerable.

The game that I made out of my garbage route was this: I was Agent 99 from Get Smart, which used to air at eight p.m. on Nickelodeon. As part of my duties as a spy, I had to go through people’s trash.

I had to.

Usually, the trash in my father’s study yielded little of interest, aside from the occasional mysterious post-it, but my Dad has miserable handwriting and a weird fondness for calligraphy markers made his writings impossible to read.

My brother’s garbage can was also dull. The only fun was that I could always report to my mother that he still had his nasty little prediliction for chewing up paper towels, but this was something I could also use as leverage against my brother when he wanted to watch Star Trek instead of Looney Toons so I often saved the evidence of my brother’s habit for blackmail at another time.

The really intriguing garbage was the last can I would hit on my route. My parent’s bathroom. Getting caught rooting around in my parent’s bathroom’s garbage can would yield consequences if I were to be caught, but the high-risk was worth the potential discovery of my brother’s adoption papers, or proof that they at least liked me better.

Once, I found what I know now was a discarded diaphragm. Once I figured out that it wasn’t a balloon, I did a little research, and mistakenly deduced that it was a condom.

I was confused when I saw the size and the girth of my first erect penis.

If their garbage was that interesting, I reasoned, imagine the stuff they were keeping! I began going through their bathroom drawers and their closets, seeing if I could discover any clues about something they were keeping from me. I just knew my Star-Trek obsessed older brother was adopted.

One day, maybe a year into my chore, my father came into his bathroom to find me shaving my forearms with his razor. I received a stern lecture about crossing certain boundaries.

“You can’t just go through other people’s stuff.”

But, really?

don't skip dinner...

OR YOU'LL DREAM LIKE AN ANOREXIC IN FASHION SCHOOL

It starts with a plane crash into a broth jacuzzi, but the passengers don’t survive like the people in that jet that landed in the Hudson River, but they aren’t even people, the passengers. They’re, like, little Lilliputian Noodle people? But they have souls, and they scream as they die in some sort of simmering pond of broth.

I should know that I’m dreaming, but I don’t.

I, my dream-self, am arriving via sky-copter. I see the crash happen from above, but I’m not nervous about my vessel meeting the same fate. Although I’ve never scene a sky-copter before, but I know that that’s what this canoe-slash-helicopter is called, and I am also aware that this copter is quite safe.
I land on a black & white tile surface oddly similar to the flooring in Tom Petty’s music video for “Don’tcomearoundherenomore” and I immediately want to eat the Lilliputian Noodle People, but they aren’t dead yet. They’ve stopped screaming but they’re still squirming around. I like sushi, but even this is too much.
Do these noodle people have blood? I don’t think they do. I am imagining they’re going to taste like pre-packaged Thai food.
I hear sound of a party from up on a ledge above. It is then that I realize I am in something resembling a Russian Bath House combined with a Japanese Zen Garden. The party I hear from above isn’t a party. Its more goddamned Lilliputian Noodle People in another broth-bath, only these Noodle People aren’t dying, they’re having a grand old time and behaving as though they’re in a hot tub.
Now I’m even more conflicted about what I should eat.
That is, until I see a silk tapestry elephant soaring in from above with a steaming pot of dead-already Udon Noodles (none of them writhing or partying) in a bowl on his back. The Udon Noodles are thicker than the Noodle people so I don’t feel like a cannibal.
The silk tapestry elephant’s back is slick. His quilts are made of multi-colored, shiny patches, and that makes it hard to climb aboard. It’s a conundrum, or maybe it’s just a puzzle and I’m too starved to come up with the proper word. I need to eat. I need to swallow those fucking noodles.
Out of nowhere, a brown weiner-dog approaches. I instinctively know that I’ve got to roll onto his back in order to climb up onto the tapestry elephants back. I do, and I accidentally knee the tapestry elephant in the ribs. The tapestry elephant whirls his head around and I jerk back, but he ends up chewing on the weiner-dog’s face.
I wake up in my bed, covered in sweat, and counting my ribs.

Muffins.

When I see little doggies on the street, I give them names, and I call out to them as they pass me bye. I like to call all doggies by the name MUFFIN. Hello, Muffin. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Sometimes, the little doggies turn to look at me as they pass, because I think they know how much I would love them if I only had the extra cash.