{"id":7765,"date":"2012-11-26T14:05:06","date_gmt":"2012-11-26T19:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=7765"},"modified":"2026-03-26T09:59:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:59:53","slug":"marcus-blog-one-mans-trash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2012\/marcus-blog-one-mans-trash\/","title":{"rendered":"One Man\u2019s Trash"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n One Man\u2019s Trash\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

The dumpster, all tumored with lazily tossed garbage bags, jittered from side to side, as if prepping to explode. A few feet from its open hatch, I stood holding a little nine-inch TV set, with power cord looped round its slightly askew bunny ears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCome on, Dave, this is disgusting. Just get an extension from the prof.\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Dave rustled around in the big, rusty box his feet went \u201csphlock-sphlock\u201d. A noise that implied he was rooting around in the kind of bubbling trash that decomposed begrudgingly, and only after the collective chemical process had become so acidic as to turn this soupy mess into a bio-terrorist\u2019s backyard workshop. His head popped out and he gave me an \u2018oh-please\u2019 look, \u2018cause clearly I was the lunatic in this situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou know I can\u2019t do that Marcus.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dave took a scorched-earth policy to end of term assignments. As soon as he hit word count he printed the sucker out and deleted the document. It worked as a kind of digital baptism, purging him of the shame he felt when, in the heat of the infamous pre-exam crunch, he inevitably dished out one or two papers that were of less than stellar material. To those of you with superstitious inclinations you will no doubt be wringing your hands already at the spitting-in-the-face-of-fate nature of Dave\u2019s habit. But you need not question your long-held beliefs because karma is just as fickle as you remember. And Dave had accidentally tossed the academic baby (and what a little homunculus gremlin it was. When Dave knew he didn\u2019t have time to give a paper its proper due, he made phoning it in seem almost heroic, stressing his own incompetence with glee. I\u2019m exaggerating, but not by much, when I say that he would turn in easy-answer papers with titles like: Was Nazi Germany Anti-Semitic?<\/em>) out with the bath water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell I can\u2019t stand guard any longer, I have to get this to Grant before my meeting with Professor M.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The TV I was holding was, thankfully, not the fruit of Dave\u2019s foraging, but instead a clunky, dusty, melancholy little thing that had sat expectantly in the corner of my rez room, begging me to use it (just once!) before its circuits finally fried. I had promised it to a pal o\u2019 mine named Grant from my Japanese Language class, the game plan at this point being to teach English in Japan after my undergraduate degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMom: I wish you\u2019d reconsider, that whole island\u2019s gone radioactive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Me: Well, maybe I\u2019ll get superpowers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mom: Or you\u2019ll turn into Godzilla.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grant was the kind of kid that was raised on anime<\/em> and manga<\/em> comics. Steeped in the finer details of reading backwards and other niceties of Japanese culture he had shot to the top of the class. Grant has a kind of mellifluous fluidity in foreign tongues between which he can alternate with the speed of C-3PO. And just like that bronzed protocol droid he was annoying if for no better reason than that he insisted on playing by the rules that the rest of us ignore on a daily basis. An indicative piece of Grantology is that, directly opposite to the ingrained nature of every single human being on the planet, he always learned the curse words of a language last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met somewhere deep in the tunnels as if surreptitiously exchanging coded-information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cO genki desuka Maruku-san?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGrant, you\u2019re from Brampton.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important to practice. Maybe you\u2019d be doing a little better if \u2013 \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah, well, here\u2019s the TV.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I really did like Grant, but in case it wasn\u2019t clear, a crippling jealousy prevented us from having anything more than the most cursory favor-for-favor kind of friendship. It was around this time that I realized that learning Japanese would take many more years (!) than I was willing to give it. And Grant\u2019s facility with languages of all kinds (he also knew French, Spanish, German and probably Ancient Sumerian and Martian too) contrasted unflatteringly with my more monolingual bend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, English: light of my life; you slutty, Lolita language, so eager to soak in other lexicons. You\u2019ve got no boundaries: a universal space without the void – a pier to no bad cove. They tried to keep us apart with ten years of French immersion and that francophony marriage only made me love my mistress more. As a result every foreign tongue is judged harshly against the silhouette of my Anglo-Saxon angel, making it near impossible for me to flirt with the harsh plosives or slippery loose syllables of some more distinguished, dame diction. Still it\u2019s not all sob stories, because in exchange for this damnable tryst I\u2019ve been given the chance to hit certain heights of cunnilinguistic bliss. But maybe I\u2019m not being humble humble enough…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unburdened of my televisual ball n\u2019 chain, up in Dunton Tower, I met with Professor M to discuss a short story I\u2019d written that he was graciously reading over. I feel I must have been fishing for compliments after my demoralizing encounter with MacArthur Genius Grant. Luckily, despite the Bond-villain pseudonym I\u2019ve given him, Professor M is an incredibly generous human being and he gave me the kind of ego-soothing encouragement that the doctor (had he been called) would have ordered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On my way out I ran into Dave, coming from another prof\u2019s office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI guess this means you found it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah, but apparently my professor isn\u2019t in the habit of accepting work with mustard stains and, like, little fly corpses strewn all over it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDamn ivory tower academics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI know, right? Anyway, she says I can bring in a clean copy tomorrow, so, no gristle off my bone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a saying.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo one has ever said that before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, can we say it\u2019s a saying?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah, sure, I can\u2019t see why not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The elevator pinged and we plunged back into the filth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The dumpster, all tumored with lazily tossed garbage bags, jittered from side to side, as if prepping to explode. A few feet from its open hatch, I stood holding a little nine-inch TV set, with power cord looped round its slightly askew bunny ears. \u201cCome on, Dave, this is disgusting. Just get an extension from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26,24,27,25,849],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-marcus-blog","category-news","category-student-blogs","category-student-voices"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7765"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53703,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765\/revisions\/53703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}