If you follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, you may have noticed I have been complaining a lot. I have noticed it too, but I can't seem to stop myself. I have become that proverbial old man yelling for people to get off his lawn. City living can require patience that living in suburbia simply doesn't. Generally even if you hate your neighbors, you can go in your house and not deal with them. Lately my neighbors have been pushing my patience to its limits.
At this point I should add 2 things that make me more susceptible to annoyance at the hands of my neighbors.
1. I love sleeping, perhaps even to an unhealthy degree. I slept through the night fairly early as an infant and have required at least 8 hours of sleep to function well pretty much ever since.
2. Despite my love affair with sleep, she is a harsh mistress. I am a light sleeper. Even with years of roommates and city living under my belt, I cannot sleep through anything. Quite the contrary, I wake up to everything. A dripping faucet, a clock that ticks loudly, mini-blinds clacking against the window in the breeze have all woken me from a sound sleep. I am sure you can see where this is going...
Someone in our building has a child who occasionally stays with them. (This is my theory anyway because I cannot tell where the sound is coming from. Our apartment faces the taller tower part of our building and with the way sounds echoes and bounces off of things I can't figure it out. It also doesn't happen every night so That's where the visiting child theory comes in.) Anyway, this person lets the child stay up well past what my parents had determined was an appropriate bed time and screams, and carries on at a volume that I have to call a full-on yell. This is not a baby crying; this is a child yelling at 12:30 am. What makes it even more fun is that they are also blaring a video game. A Star Wars video game. How do I know? I can hear it clear as day.
I try to be calm and deal with it. I even put in those squishy earplugs people wear when they work someplace loud. This helps muffle the general noise of the game but then something exciting happens in the game and the child must scream, "Oh My God!" 15 times over. I seriously consider yelling at them. It is at the forefront of my thoughts but I doubt they would even hear me over the noise. So I suffer in silence and plot passive aggressive ways to seek revenge (passive aggression is a PNW thing). Of course, I don't even have a place to direct this aggression as I cannot identify the truly inconsiderate neighbor.
This issue leaves me tired, angry and feeling powerless to change the situation, which makes me grumpy. Everything else is magnified. Minor annoyances are huge issues that I cannot bear and the internet is a perfect place to vent my feelings. So here, we are and I have no solution. My apologies for my cantankerous posts.