roseyviolet (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} roseyv) wrote,@ 2008-02-13 16:57:00 |
|
What It Should Say
Dear Neighbor:
First, my condolences. For reasons that will quickly become clear, I am deeply saddened by your apparent protracted descent into madness. I am still more deeply saddened by the fact that you are, it seems, unfamiliar with the concept of “going quietly insane,” and have rather opted to do so with as much banging, slamming, whooping, late-night insomniac TV-blasting and eerie, two a.m. keening and sobbing as possible. Clearly, you have decided that while you may be on your way to the mental house, you’ll be damned if you’re going alone, and have determined to take me along with you.
I am somewhat heartened by the fact that you have at least decided to take the most varied path to crazy, what with the random pinballing between heartfelt post-midnight weeping and pre-7 am hooting and singing along with the stereo. Really, nothing starts my day off brighter than the sound of a 55-year-old woman in high-heeled shoes, pacing manically back and forth on a hardwood floor with Sade’s Greatest Hits in the background, blaring away at a volume normally reserved for Icelandic thrash metal, and occasionally punctuating the oontz-oontz-oontz with an operatic “Whoooooooooo! Whoooooohhhhooooooooo!” And all this before the sun has fully risen in the sky! Color me refreshed.
And I am truly sorry that this morning, as it rapidly became clear this was going to be at least a 3 a.m. session, rather than your more usual 2, I finally lost my shit and started banging on the ceiling with a Balinese candlestick. That was intemperate of me, especially given the fragility of the plaster. This is in fact why I chose the candleholder, with its flat, padded base, rather than the standard mop handle. At one point I had thought the Swiffer would make a good banging implement, with its padded rubber head and all, but when I tried that last Saturday afternoon, your gusty screeching along with Celine Dion rendered its effects, well, ineffectual. In any event, I do actually feel rather bad about my outburst, although your immediate response — clicking off the set and skittering sheepishly back to your bed — did finally allow me nearly four and a half uninterrupted hours of sleep before you were up and at ‘em again at 6, so I thank you for that. Crazy you may be, but you sure know how to take a hint.
The thing is, I do recognize my own complicity in our mutual dilemma. The problem is that with one or two isolated exceptions, I’ve never really taken any serious action to make you aware that your every blessed movement is painfully audible to me in my apartment. I suspect that this is because you are a stone-deaf 55-year-old woman prone to spiked heels and skintight jeans, who refuses to consider wearing a hearing aid, because then she could no longer “fool” people that she was only 29. Cattiness aside, this is entirely your delusion, and frankly, your problem. My problem is that consequently, you are incapable of accomplishing the merest household task — watching the news, playing a CD, sweeping the floor, dressing yourself, talking on the telephone, having a conversation with a neighbor — at anything below the sort of ear-splitting volume that forces me to share in your agony over your GASTROENTERITIS FLARING UP AGAIN, your grief over what I can only assume was the loss of your father a couple of years back (DAAAAADDDDDYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!! DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADEEEEEEEEE
See, when I first moved into this apartment, I was working a midnight shift. I would arrive home and try to get myself settled into bed every morning at around six. Then, at around 6:10, you would begin your morning routine. First, you would cause what I could only imagine to be two large, ten-pound lead weights to hit the hardwood from a height of around six feet. BAM!! BAM!!! Then, three mornings out of five, you would begin the task of — so it sounded — repeatedly moving a pair of five-foot metal filing cabinets back and forth from one end of the bedroom to the other, usually for about twenty minutes at a stretch. Then, you’d put on your spiked shoes and begin your pacing. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth across the bedroom floor. Over and over and over and over and over and over. This would usually eat up the best part of an hour. Now, admittedly, I live on the first floor of our building, and it is in the nature of apartment buildings that most first-floor apartments tend to be a bit smaller than the others on their line, due to the loss of area from the lobby, mailboxes, and so on. So it stands to reason that although the layout of your apartment is largely identical to mine, your bedroom is probably at least a little bigger. But how the fuck bigger could it possibly be? Unless you’re living in the damn TARDIS up there, once you’ve accounted for the space taken up by a small dresser and even a full-size mattress and box spring, there can’t be more than a three-foot path roughly ten feet in length running the width of that room. What in the hell are you DOING up there?
Anyway, I took this mostly in stride. After all, it wasn’t your fault that I worked weird hours. And the fact is, most people do work 9-to-5, and really, it almost didn’t matter who was living above me, there was bound to be some noise at that hour, and the thing was, you were always scrupulous about being out the door by 7:45, and at that point I could sleep peacefully for the rest of the day, so I put up with it because I try to be a nice person and not make waves and it just seemed like the most reasonable thing to do.
Then, about a week after I renewed my lease for a second year, you broke out the CD player for the first time. As I said, I’m guessing this was a Christmas gift, and it probably took you until early February to get around to buying a CD. And what with your profound hearing loss and all, you probably didn’t notice right away that when you turned it on for the first time, the volume control was turned alllllllllllllll the way to the right. An honest mistake, even if it did cause the dishes to buzz rhythmically in my kitchen cabinets, my piano to vibrate atonally and me to suffer a near cardiac episode upon being jolted from a sound sleep by a cacophony that would shock the conscience of Hell. It took a moment for me to figure out what was happening, and at that point I simply lay back down, stunned, literally shaking and sweating as my heartbeat attempted to recover, and waited for you to realize your error, and correct it.
You did not.
I lay there for moment more, knowing full well that you would have to fix the damn thing shortly, because surely no sane human being could possibly fail to see that this situation was unacceptable.
I was wrong.
Incredulous, I got out of bed. This was before you moved all the furniture around, and the stereo was still in your living room, so unbelievably, when I got into my living room, it was actually louder out there. I mean, seriously. This was so loud that, had my stereo sounded this loud in my apartment, I would have been like, shit, that’s loud! I better turn it down before the neighbors complain.
At first, I didn’t even know what to do. The thing is, it was 10 am on a Saturday. What you were doing was appalling — truly, I have never heard anything like this in my life — but technically, you weren’t in violation of your lease. Every code of basic human behavior, maybe but not your lease. And for the first time, I found myself in that self-inflicted Catch-22: I had never complained before, so in a way, I had implied consent. Also, it was just so completely fucked up that I couldn’t even imagine your possible response. Normal people don’t do things like this, and abnormal people, in my experience, don’t respond well to confrontation. So finally I did the only thing I could think of: I went out for a couple of hours, hoping someone else would bang on your door in the meantime and deal with the situation for me. (Yes, I suck.)
But — no such luck. Not only that, but when I left the apartment and went out into the lobby, I found that your noise was not only audible in the lobby — through the closed door and plaster walls of your apartment, the granite hallway floors, and down a large flight of stairs from the second floor — but it was actually drowning out the “Muzak” they play incessantly in the common areas of the building. Not that this was a bad thing, I mention it just to give anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating about this a sense of perspective.
Finally, when I returned home to find no change, I went up to speak to you about it. I knocked. And knocked. And rang. And knocked. And rang again, and finally I got a response. Through the closed door, and from some distance down the inside hall of the apartment, I heard a vague, insipid: “Who is it?”
Who is it?
Who fucking is it? It’s fucking Sade, you deaf-ass moron. I wanted to thank you for your support.
As calmly as possible, I screamed through the door: “Will you please turn that down?!”
“Oh. Sorry.”
And then silence.
And in your defense, it was never quite as horrifically bad as that again, but that’s not saying as much as it should be. Moreover, on those rare occasions when I have lost all patience and banged on the ceiling, or in one particular instance, literally yelled up through it to “PLEASE TURN THAT DOWN!!’ your response has always been immediate and definitive. You instantly turn whatever it is entirely off for the rest of the day. Which leads me to think that you are actually capable of understanding how infuriating your behavior is, and regretting it, but just not quite capable of not doing it in the first place.
Which brings us almost up to date. About a year and a half ago, I changed shifts at work. I went from working 10pm to 5:30am to working noon to 8pm. Mornings were still hell, but since I could still sleep a little later than most people (till as late as 10), it wasn’t that bad. And at first, the nights weren’t too bad. Then, late last October, you suddenly developed a late-night TV habit. Mercifully, you do not keep the TV as loud as you do the stereo. In fact, I suspect you think you have it on “pretty low” and in fact, maybe you even do, comparatively speaking. The problem is that it doesn’t matter what the actual volume is — when it’s after midnight and I’m trying to sleep and your television is going eight feet above my head, that’s a problem for me. I mean, the lease does prohibit “excessive” noise between midnight and 7 a.m., and I realize that “excessive” is a pretty vague concept. I also realize that basically telling people that between 7 and midnight, they can be as excessive as they damn well please is probably not the best idea if you’re trying to create an atmosphere of relative accord between your tenants, but I digress. Anyway, here’s my definition of “excessive noise:” If something is loud enough to be heard all the way in someone ELSE’S apartment? That’s excessive. Sound reasonable?
And this has become a nightly routine. You typically keep the thing going at least until two in the morning. Some nights it’s later than that, but I can’t be more specific than that because eventually, I do fall asleep, after a fashion. I mean, I wake up every hour on the hour when the title music of a new show causes the volume to briefly increase. And I literally dream the sound of droning, male, public-affairs type talking heads (I don’t know exactly what you’re watching up there, but I have eleven thousand dollars that says it’s Fox News). The other night, I actually dreamed (really) that the voices were droning and droning and yammering and yammering, and I was walking around the with the broom handle, trying to bang on the ceiling, but my arms wouldn’t reach, and every time I tapped the plaster, a big crack would open and clods would fall down. I woke up almost crying.
So when I finally flipped the fuck out on you this morning, it probably came as a bit of a shock to you. And you in such poor health and all, and clearly having a lot of problems with which, at some level, I sort of do sympathize. I have chronic pain myself, and it’s not pretty. My dad passed away in 1997 and it was a rough time, because women of our generation did not necessarily have the best relationships with our fathers and it’s hard, I know, that so many things probably went unsaid. I know what it’s like when you’re forced to realize that if you can’t just pull your shit together and stop complaining about how everything hurts and you don’t know what you’re going to do, eventually your friends may start to pull away, and that’s scary. On the other hand, sometimes, I’m just unaccountably happy, and I cheerfully hum or giggle at some suddenly remembered amusing thing someone said earlier, and — largely because of you — I realize I need to keep it down in case people overhear me and think I’m cracking up in here. I’m a single woman getting on in years, and sometimes I feel lonely. I have wept silently in my bed on more than one occasion in the past few years, but the operative word here, cuckoo lady, is silently.
Silently.
So what I guess I’m trying to say is, it sucks. I know. It does. But it’s not going to get any better until you start working on it by, I dunno. Going to the doctor and telling him you worry sometimes that you may be losing your hearing. Okay, that one’s a little self-serving on my part, but hey, it’d still be a good start. Because seriously, if this does not stop like, now? I am going to file a formal complaint with the landlord and if you really are anything like me, that is not something you’re going to enjoy. So please.
Get some headphones.
Get some therapy.
Take a damn Lunesta.
But for God’s sake, keep it down up there because while I sympathize with your ill health, I will not stand for it damaging mine.
Regards home,
Rosey
What It Actually Says
Dear Neighbor:
Please try and keep the volume of your TV/Stereo down, especially late at night and first thing in the morning.
Thanks!
(Yeah, I suck.)
Dear Neighbor:
First, my condolences. For reasons that will quickly become clear, I am deeply saddened by your apparent protracted descent into madness. I am still more deeply saddened by the fact that you are, it seems, unfamiliar with the concept of “going quietly insane,” and have rather opted to do so with as much banging, slamming, whooping, late-night insomniac TV-blasting and eerie, two a.m. keening and sobbing as possible. Clearly, you have decided that while you may be on your way to the mental house, you’ll be damned if you’re going alone, and have determined to take me along with you.
I am somewhat heartened by the fact that you have at least decided to take the most varied path to crazy, what with the random pinballing between heartfelt post-midnight weeping and pre-7 am hooting and singing along with the stereo. Really, nothing starts my day off brighter than the sound of a 55-year-old woman in high-heeled shoes, pacing manically back and forth on a hardwood floor with Sade’s Greatest Hits in the background, blaring away at a volume normally reserved for Icelandic thrash metal, and occasionally punctuating the oontz-oontz-oontz with an operatic “Whoooooooooo! Whoooooohhhhooooooooo!” And all this before the sun has fully risen in the sky! Color me refreshed.
And I am truly sorry that this morning, as it rapidly became clear this was going to be at least a 3 a.m. session, rather than your more usual 2, I finally lost my shit and started banging on the ceiling with a Balinese candlestick. That was intemperate of me, especially given the fragility of the plaster. This is in fact why I chose the candleholder, with its flat, padded base, rather than the standard mop handle. At one point I had thought the Swiffer would make a good banging implement, with its padded rubber head and all, but when I tried that last Saturday afternoon, your gusty screeching along with Celine Dion rendered its effects, well, ineffectual. In any event, I do actually feel rather bad about my outburst, although your immediate response — clicking off the set and skittering sheepishly back to your bed — did finally allow me nearly four and a half uninterrupted hours of sleep before you were up and at ‘em again at 6, so I thank you for that. Crazy you may be, but you sure know how to take a hint.
The thing is, I do recognize my own complicity in our mutual dilemma. The problem is that with one or two isolated exceptions, I’ve never really taken any serious action to make you aware that your every blessed movement is painfully audible to me in my apartment. I suspect that this is because you are a stone-deaf 55-year-old woman prone to spiked heels and skintight jeans, who refuses to consider wearing a hearing aid, because then she could no longer “fool” people that she was only 29. Cattiness aside, this is entirely your delusion, and frankly, your problem. My problem is that consequently, you are incapable of accomplishing the merest household task — watching the news, playing a CD, sweeping the floor, dressing yourself, talking on the telephone, having a conversation with a neighbor — at anything below the sort of ear-splitting volume that forces me to share in your agony over your GASTROENTERITIS FLARING UP AGAIN, your grief over what I can only assume was the loss of your father a couple of years back (DAAAAADDDDDYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!! DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADEEEEEEEEE
See, when I first moved into this apartment, I was working a midnight shift. I would arrive home and try to get myself settled into bed every morning at around six. Then, at around 6:10, you would begin your morning routine. First, you would cause what I could only imagine to be two large, ten-pound lead weights to hit the hardwood from a height of around six feet. BAM!! BAM!!! Then, three mornings out of five, you would begin the task of — so it sounded — repeatedly moving a pair of five-foot metal filing cabinets back and forth from one end of the bedroom to the other, usually for about twenty minutes at a stretch. Then, you’d put on your spiked shoes and begin your pacing. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth and
back and forth across the bedroom floor. Over and over and over and over and over and over. This would usually eat up the best part of an hour. Now, admittedly, I live on the first floor of our building, and it is in the nature of apartment buildings that most first-floor apartments tend to be a bit smaller than the others on their line, due to the loss of area from the lobby, mailboxes, and so on. So it stands to reason that although the layout of your apartment is largely identical to mine, your bedroom is probably at least a little bigger. But how the fuck bigger could it possibly be? Unless you’re living in the damn TARDIS up there, once you’ve accounted for the space taken up by a small dresser and even a full-size mattress and box spring, there can’t be more than a three-foot path roughly ten feet in length running the width of that room. What in the hell are you DOING up there?
Anyway, I took this mostly in stride. After all, it wasn’t your fault that I worked weird hours. And the fact is, most people do work 9-to-5, and really, it almost didn’t matter who was living above me, there was bound to be some noise at that hour, and the thing was, you were always scrupulous about being out the door by 7:45, and at that point I could sleep peacefully for the rest of the day, so I put up with it because I try to be a nice person and not make waves and it just seemed like the most reasonable thing to do.
Then, about a week after I renewed my lease for a second year, you broke out the CD player for the first time. As I said, I’m guessing this was a Christmas gift, and it probably took you until early February to get around to buying a CD. And what with your profound hearing loss and all, you probably didn’t notice right away that when you turned it on for the first time, the volume control was turned alllllllllllllll the way to the right. An honest mistake, even if it did cause the dishes to buzz rhythmically in my kitchen cabinets, my piano to vibrate atonally and me to suffer a near cardiac episode upon being jolted from a sound sleep by a cacophony that would shock the conscience of Hell. It took a moment for me to figure out what was happening, and at that point I simply lay back down, stunned, literally shaking and sweating as my heartbeat attempted to recover, and waited for you to realize your error, and correct it.
You did not.
I lay there for moment more, knowing full well that you would have to fix the damn thing shortly, because surely no sane human being could possibly fail to see that this situation was unacceptable.
I was wrong.
Incredulous, I got out of bed. This was before you moved all the furniture around, and the stereo was still in your living room, so unbelievably, when I got into my living room, it was actually louder out there. I mean, seriously. This was so loud that, had my stereo sounded this loud in my apartment, I would have been like, shit, that’s loud! I better turn it down before the neighbors complain.
At first, I didn’t even know what to do. The thing is, it was 10 am on a Saturday. What you were doing was appalling — truly, I have never heard anything like this in my life — but technically, you weren’t in violation of your lease. Every code of basic human behavior, maybe but not your lease. And for the first time, I found myself in that self-inflicted Catch-22: I had never complained before, so in a way, I had implied consent. Also, it was just so completely fucked up that I couldn’t even imagine your possible response. Normal people don’t do things like this, and abnormal people, in my experience, don’t respond well to confrontation. So finally I did the only thing I could think of: I went out for a couple of hours, hoping someone else would bang on your door in the meantime and deal with the situation for me. (Yes, I suck.)
But — no such luck. Not only that, but when I left the apartment and went out into the lobby, I found that your noise was not only audible in the lobby — through the closed door and plaster walls of your apartment, the granite hallway floors, and down a large flight of stairs from the second floor — but it was actually drowning out the “Muzak” they play incessantly in the common areas of the building. Not that this was a bad thing, I mention it just to give anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating about this a sense of perspective.
Finally, when I returned home to find no change, I went up to speak to you about it. I knocked. And knocked. And rang. And knocked. And rang again, and finally I got a response. Through the closed door, and from some distance down the inside hall of the apartment, I heard a vague, insipid: “Who is it?”
Who is it?
Who fucking is it? It’s fucking Sade, you deaf-ass moron. I wanted to thank you for your support.
As calmly as possible, I screamed through the door: “Will you please turn that down?!”
“Oh. Sorry.”
And then silence.
And in your defense, it was never quite as horrifically bad as that again, but that’s not saying as much as it should be. Moreover, on those rare occasions when I have lost all patience and banged on the ceiling, or in one particular instance, literally yelled up through it to “PLEASE TURN THAT DOWN!!’ your response has always been immediate and definitive. You instantly turn whatever it is entirely off for the rest of the day. Which leads me to think that you are actually capable of understanding how infuriating your behavior is, and regretting it, but just not quite capable of not doing it in the first place.
Which brings us almost up to date. About a year and a half ago, I changed shifts at work. I went from working 10pm to 5:30am to working noon to 8pm. Mornings were still hell, but since I could still sleep a little later than most people (till as late as 10), it wasn’t that bad. And at first, the nights weren’t too bad. Then, late last October, you suddenly developed a late-night TV habit. Mercifully, you do not keep the TV as loud as you do the stereo. In fact, I suspect you think you have it on “pretty low” and in fact, maybe you even do, comparatively speaking. The problem is that it doesn’t matter what the actual volume is — when it’s after midnight and I’m trying to sleep and your television is going eight feet above my head, that’s a problem for me. I mean, the lease does prohibit “excessive” noise between midnight and 7 a.m., and I realize that “excessive” is a pretty vague concept. I also realize that basically telling people that between 7 and midnight, they can be as excessive as they damn well please is probably not the best idea if you’re trying to create an atmosphere of relative accord between your tenants, but I digress. Anyway, here’s my definition of “excessive noise:” If something is loud enough to be heard all the way in someone ELSE’S apartment? That’s excessive. Sound reasonable?
And this has become a nightly routine. You typically keep the thing going at least until two in the morning. Some nights it’s later than that, but I can’t be more specific than that because eventually, I do fall asleep, after a fashion. I mean, I wake up every hour on the hour when the title music of a new show causes the volume to briefly increase. And I literally dream the sound of droning, male, public-affairs type talking heads (I don’t know exactly what you’re watching up there, but I have eleven thousand dollars that says it’s Fox News). The other night, I actually dreamed (really) that the voices were droning and droning and yammering and yammering, and I was walking around the with the broom handle, trying to bang on the ceiling, but my arms wouldn’t reach, and every time I tapped the plaster, a big crack would open and clods would fall down. I woke up almost crying.
So when I finally flipped the fuck out on you this morning, it probably came as a bit of a shock to you. And you in such poor health and all, and clearly having a lot of problems with which, at some level, I sort of do sympathize. I have chronic pain myself, and it’s not pretty. My dad passed away in 1997 and it was a rough time, because women of our generation did not necessarily have the best relationships with our fathers and it’s hard, I know, that so many things probably went unsaid. I know what it’s like when you’re forced to realize that if you can’t just pull your shit together and stop complaining about how everything hurts and you don’t know what you’re going to do, eventually your friends may start to pull away, and that’s scary. On the other hand, sometimes, I’m just unaccountably happy, and I cheerfully hum or giggle at some suddenly remembered amusing thing someone said earlier, and — largely because of you — I realize I need to keep it down in case people overhear me and think I’m cracking up in here. I’m a single woman getting on in years, and sometimes I feel lonely. I have wept silently in my bed on more than one occasion in the past few years, but the operative word here, cuckoo lady, is silently.
Silently.
So what I guess I’m trying to say is, it sucks. I know. It does. But it’s not going to get any better until you start working on it by, I dunno. Going to the doctor and telling him you worry sometimes that you may be losing your hearing. Okay, that one’s a little self-serving on my part, but hey, it’d still be a good start. Because seriously, if this does not stop like, now? I am going to file a formal complaint with the landlord and if you really are anything like me, that is not something you’re going to enjoy. So please.
Get some headphones.
Get some therapy.
Take a damn Lunesta.
But for God’s sake, keep it down up there because while I sympathize with your ill health, I will not stand for it damaging mine.
Regards home,
Rosey
What It Actually Says
Dear Neighbor:
Please try and keep the volume of your TV/Stereo down, especially late at night and first thing in the morning.
Thanks!
(Yeah, I suck.)
