Once

Once upon a time, exactly one year ago, Brant asked me to marry him. It was among the happiest moments of my life. Over this year my love has only grown stronger (which I was not sure was even possible). Happy "engagement day," monkey. You make my world so much more fulfilling. Here are some of my best memories from the past year with you.

Alley Anger

On Tuesday night at about 11:00pm, I put my book down and turned off the light to go to sleep. It was at that point that I heard someone going through the dumpster outside our bedroom windows in the alley behind our condo. This is not an unusual occurrence. We live in down town Denver and our alley is frequented by homeless people looking for things to eat, sell, wear or otherwise use. In this case, the man (I am presuming he was male) was looking for aluminum cans to get the deposit on them. I know this because I could hear him ripping open and rifling through every bag with an intermittent "plink" on to the pavement when he came across one. Normally, this would not bother me- I tend to be sympathetic to the homeless and have been known to cry when seeing a person eating the ketchup out of packets from the dumpster. However, it really pissed me off for some reason. Actually, I discovered as I thought about it that it was for a lot of reasons (I had a while to think because he was in there forever). Here is a brief list:

• It was 11pm. I am of the opinion that 10pm is the cutoff for outside noise on a weekday. Dumpster dive between the hours of 7am and 10pm, please.


• The walls of our condo are so fucking thin that I could hear him like I was standing next to him- seriously, who built this place?


• Why are there no locks on our dumpsters?


• Why do I want locks on the dumpsters? Shouldn't the homeless at least have a chance to rummage through what the "homed" consider waste?


• Why are there aluminum cans in the trash? A homeless man should NEVER find a can in any dumpster or trash can- RECYCLE, people!


• Why was I getting so irate? I was in a nice, warm bed with the heat on trying to sleep while another human being was out in the cold, probably under dressed with no where to sleep.


• I am not lacking on sleep- waiting the extra 30 minutes to fall asleep was not going to kill me but I was furious


• Why do I have to work? Maybe I should be homeless- is it really that bad? I could even pay off most things and keep my car and camping stuff and just roam around with Brant all the time. Why does this guy not have to worry about getting sleep to go to work in the morning. I was actually momentarily jealous


• All of these conflicted feelings were making me feel selfish and greedy and bad about myself

In the end, I let the greedy, selfish Brenda loose for a minute and yelled at the top of my lungs, "MOVE ON, ALREADY. SOME OF US HAVE JOBS AND HAVE TO WORK TOMORROW!!!" He may have been to absorbed with his quest for value in the dumpster to hear me, but if the noise travels out the same way it travels in, he probably did. I felt a guilty pleasure in doing it. I felt justified in being pissed and at the same time slimy for not being sensitive to the plight of another human being. I was actually expecting to find trash lined up against the garage or some other form of retaliation, but I didn't. Finally, I rolled over and got the ear plugs out of the drawer and put them in. If I would have just done that in the first place I could have saved 30 minutes of sleep and some precious sanity.