Gomi Anxiety

Even after several years, I’m having some trouble readjusting to life in the United States.  There are so many things I miss about Japan:  our friends, the fish, the trains! And the U.S. is so overwhelming.  I can read the junk mail and understand strangers’ conversations when I’m not even listening.  Really.  I don’t want to know. 

I need a sedative to go to the grocery store.  Employees inquire if I need assistance when I stand walleyed before a dozen different brands of soap.  How could I possibly choose amongst all the offerings?  The cereal aisle makes me hysterical.

But it’s the garbage that really gets to me.  We lived in Japan for nine years, all told, and here in the U.S. I am experiencing significant gomi anxiety.  A friend who still lives in Japan laments having received a fifty-five page guide for correct rubbish disposal:  burnable and non-burnable gomi and twelve categories of recycling with their corresponding collection days -- and in some cases, locations.  I’ll admit it’s complicated, but at least it’s clear.

Back in the U.S., I find I am unable to throw some things away because I have no manual.  There’s a website, of course, and each of our containers has been given a personal name (Rosie, Herby, Lenny) – but it’s not the same.  I miss having a guide with useful drawings and friendly encouragement.  Our recycling bin is a barbaric jumble of unsegregated containers:  glass, plastics, cardboard and tins all in one unsightly heap. 

Did I say tins?  I meant cans. 

We don’t cut and tie cardboard into neat bundles.  I can’t even get my family to rinse out the yogurt tubs and pesto jars before tossing them.  I feel ashamed.

It’s not that I’m obsessive about housekeeping.  It’s just that there’s no coping with the chaos of our refuse.  It makes me feel like my life is spiraling out of control, spewing floods of offal and an untamed trail of trash.  I know that there is a civilized way of handling these things and I can’t go back to this complete lack of order.  It’s just that I was trained.  I want to dispose of my garbage properly. 

I’m becoming an unwilling hoarder.  I can’t make myself throw dead batteries into the solid waste bin, so I hide them in nooks and crannies around the house.  There’s a dead hydrangea on the kitchen counter because the pot is a plastic that can’t be recycled and I’m not sure if the plant counts as yard waste.  It’s a house plant!  It’s been there for four days.  There are so many things that don’t really seem to belong in any of our containers.  How can anyone manage with only three collection categories?  There’s so little resolution in this system.

But the worst, by far, is Starbucks.  There’s no liquid disposal channel, no place to put the leftover ice.  And no way to separate the plastic lids and straws from the paper cups and cardboard sleeves.  No moeru/moenai options.  So I take my cups with me to sort at home.  “I’m not quite finished,” I say to my husband, so he won’t have me committed.

Of all the things we should import from Japan – kotatsus (those wonderful blanket tables with heaters under them), drains with net bags instead of garbage disposals, genkans! – it’s the rubbish protocols we need most urgently.  Send me a manual, preferably in sympathetic Jenglish!