My Brooklyn life as a "crazy garbage lady"

I resurrected this essay, "How I Became a Crazy Garbage Lady," that never got published when I wrote it in 2013 because it's one of my favorites, falling into the "laughing at myself" and "truth is stranger than fiction" categories. Here's the opening:

This morning, I stepped outside my apartment on Williamsburg’s busy Metropolitan Avenue to find my worst nightmare come true: my discarded bra, t-shirt, gym shorts, empty CD cases and other bits of garbage I’d carefully placed in a plastic bag were strewn across the grate in front of my building, apparently not even worthy of being collected by New York City’s sanitation department. I’m not sure what I did to violate the rules, considering that I discarded dozens of CD cases and only a few were lying there, displayed like some bizarre conceptual art piece, but it’s precisely the fear of this scenario that’s turned me into a woman I jokingly call “crazy garbage lady.”

Read the whole thing at Thought Catalog.