"Nic knows stress and anxiety aren't the healthiest of fitness aids, but losing 3 lbs instead of the more usual 1 lb this week has draped a silver lining over the whole shenanigans."
I'm not usually such a vaguebooker (which is said to be basically any update on facebook that can be intentionally or unintentionally vague or ambiguous, and although primarily used by attention-seekers, it can be a useful tool to let people who already understand what you're talking about know that things are 1) okay, 2) worse, 3) the same, 4) ugh who knows - it's vaguebooking, and I should have known better) but sometimes a little cyber letting-off-steam makes you feel better! Plus, and I have to be honest here, most people knew what I was talking about anyway.
So, I hear you cry out in genuine non-vague-book interest, what was I talking about? Ah, 'twas merely the latest instalment of my ever-more bizarre history of bad neighbours, an epic of which has been shared for many years over the internet (and therefore was an already occurring theme by this update effort), and before that, the phone. (BEFORE THE INTERNET???) I know. I show my age in that very telling of sentences.
I don't know. It's the strangest of things. As single, fat, frightened, foreign female (oy) living in a beautiful eighteenth-century (converted) apartment block in the most-beautiful part of a medieval city, I tried my very best fit in - learning the language, and trying to be unseen and unheard by my neighbours (through years of allowing myself to be indoctrinated into the belief system that to be fat and female and single was shameful and an automatic target for hate derision) because who needs neighbour grief on top of everything else? It started well; the nine flats in my building were filled with families and working people, nice folk who were polite, friendly, and courteous. By the time I left, I was the only person in the building who wasn't a student, and most of the families and working residents had left the area, mainly because of the noise and the constant partying up and down the street. It was quite the transformation.
I did try to begin with to courteously let my neighbours know that their noise was perhaps travelling further afield than they were aware, because sometimes people just don't realise how their noise penetrates walls and can be amplified so very easily by empty ceiling cavities. This was fine until there were more and more flats in the building being noisy night after night. It was like fighting a forest fire with a thimble of water. I became horrifically sleep-deprived, and dreadfully anxious all the time, and although the abuse from those neighbours is long in the past now (I even called the police a few times and I remember phoning during a particularly riotous party where the revellers thought it a good idea to pound on my walls and door continually for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, I was told first that they didn't understand my attempts at their language, then that the noise-makers were just students, and basically just to suck it up), it left an indelible mark on my psyche.
So moving here to a flat at the top of a converted house of five flats that the owner assured me was filled with only working, professional women over the age of thirty, was balm to my troubled soul. And so it was until he died, his wife took over, and my quiet (only) downstairs neighbour moved out. The downstairs floor had long ago been converted into two separate rooms that would share their facilities, the stairs up to which were also the stairs to the door of my own flat, which sits in the hallway of their floor (I suspect the conversion from a massive house to flats was quite cheaply done) In came two male students, one nineteen, the other twenty-three and up surged my anxiety level.
It was presumptuous of me to expect these blokes to behave in the same way as my previous tormentors, and I did have one week of bliss when there was only one of them here, and I found out that this one was actually working full-time to the point of exhaustion, and was not a student at all. Unfortunately that peace stopped when the real student moved in, bringing with him many friends, a love of Lady Gaga, which in itself is not really a cause for concern, and a penchant for late-night poker games, which was.
He has never lived in a 'real' house before, so he tells me. He lived, up until becoming a student, in the basement apartment of one of his parents houses, and has his own front door so he can come and go as he pleases and party for all hours because no-one can hear him. (The other house is in the Dordogne, and he lives in one of the converted outbuildings when he goes there to ski in the winter...)
Ugh, this is all very gossipy. The crux of the matter is he doesn't like being asked to be quiet once the clocks hit midnight, and, technically, according to city ordnances, he's supposed to stop making noise that's loud enough to disturb the neighbours by ten. He was actually quite nice to begin with, but has taken against having what he considers to be his student rights to a party lifestyle criticised, and doesn't like to be reminded that he is not living in a student house, but actually in a place where he is surrounded by families, working folk, and pensioners.
Anyway, it's time to contact the agency because being shouted at and verbally abused because I dare to complain about him holding noisy parties and boisterous poker games four times a week until three or four in the morning has gone beyond the thresholds of my patience. I feel ill. I'm not sleeping. I'm scared to leave my apartment because I have to walk through their hallway to get out.
But I have lost three pounds this week, instead of the usual one.
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