The orange walls* are closing in on me, (see footnote) and the only escape is into the 5*C Sunday that awaits just beyond the street door, which can offer little more than a bunch of closed shops and fog at the moment. It’s November now, so long gone are the days when I could just go to the park, go to an open air café and read when my upstairs neighbor decided to hammer for hours or invite friends over with tappy high heels or stompy boots over to noise-up my life. Things stayed open later and the beer gardens in the park were open on Sundays in summer, a fact I never appreciated until the onset of autumn, when my mystery upstairs neighbor and I entered into our stressful one-side relationship.
Let’s see what do I know about him? In reality, almost nothing, I’m not even 100% sure he is a male. I know what songs he likes to play on the guitar when I’m trying to relax after a long day at work, and it seems he’s doing some kind of construction on his bathroom that involves a ton of drilling and a hammering. He is not Amish, he constructs on the lord’s day! I know that after a hard day of hammering he likes to play songs on the guitar with the word one in it: “One” by Metallica, “One” by U2, come to mind as some of his favorites. Sometimes he sings along, and sounds manly, so I have decided he, must be male. He watches TV in the morning, usually the news, and spends more time in the living area rather than the kitchen, and tons of time in the bathroom, usually with the ceiling fan on. He takes short showers, and doesn’t seem to use anything electric in the bathroom (other than the drill) things like razors, trimmers, toothbrushes, hair dryer, penis pump- whatever men use to get ready. So he’s definitely got to be male; no woman would forgo a hair drying this time of year! My conclusion is he is a 400 pounder , or 181 kilos, in other words 28.5 stones based on his stomping. I imagine he has a nasty, ratty beard, not had a hair cut in a while, and he eats cereal and makes the tapper friends bring him pizzas or Mc Donalds for every meal, (there has to be a reason for the amount of time he clocks in that bathroom, (and there is no Los Jarritos here) so it has to be a result of pizza* (see footnote). What confuses me is how his fat, lazy ass finds the energy to do all this pounding and drilling, and why he has all these female friends, that clearly sleep-over as they are up and high healed tippy-tapping by 7am, but I have never heard any sex sounds from above- that’s a relief- it would wreak havoc on my self-esteem if this slob was getting some from sexy-shoe wearing squeaking- squawker girls (one of his female friends laughs, no cackles in the most annoying way) when I’m all alone in flannel jams in my single bed. (See footnote on this topic). Oh, and this neighbor of mine, smokes pot in the stairwell in the late afternoons, I’m sure of it. When I’m running the steps (something I do as a result of being too indecisive about which gym to join) it is often a 14 floor hot box, and the most intense part is always around the 13th floor; his floor!
The last two weekends in addition to his construction project, this guitar playing stomper has also thrown a couple parties! I have made a pact with myself that the next party he hosts, I’m going up! I will attend this party as a reconnaissance mission, because I must know who he is and why he was not taught to step softly, or at least take your shoes off when you’re I the house- this is not the US! People actually soil the soles of their shoes when they leave the house- there are elements here man! Last sentence- he is silent alas. I hear only the faint sounds of someone's far off spin cycle groaning and vibrating my walls just slightly, I was going to step out for a while, but perhaps I should stay and enjoy the silence.
FOOTNOTES:
**Orange Walls: the walls of my kitchen are a delightful shade of peachish- orange. I think it’s supposed to be Tuscan looking. You would have to have lived my life to really understand my hatred for certain shades of yellow and orange, as I had a yellow and oranges bedroom when from ages 0-12, and I spent many a ‘night thinking about how I could destroy that dandelion wall paper, the flowers actually frightened me as a toddler- they just looked like such an unfriendly sinister flower. Some little girls picked dandelions on their way to school- I squashed them like a cigarette butt and cursed their existence.
**Pizza** This footnote actually require another footnote about the Grandiosa Effect" a term I have invented to decribe what it's like to live with 8 Scandinavian male college students. Sounds like a fantasy eh ladies? Well, it's not! The two month after I finishd university, I was preparing to move to Prague for the first time, but could not actually go until late July, so I continued living in a dorm on the University of Oslo campus, though no longer a student. 7 rooms, one bathroom! The problem was, those sneaky Sweds decided to double up- rooms that were intended for one, were occupied by two to save money. Scandinavians in general don't really cook, and Scandi males only cook one thing- Grandiosa frozen pizza. As the ritual went, the oven worked overtime that summer, as each boy fired their pizza one after another, then took it in their room to eat alone (anti-social scandi's! I was always alone in the kitchen eating my salad). Then two hours later the run for the bathroom started, so between 19:00-21:00 I would hear the boys scrambling for the newspaper, some footsteps, then the lock snap on the toilet door; the bathroom was booked solid for two hours! I often had to walk over to friends places that lived nearby, if I needed to use the toilet, because there was no chance it would be available, and even if it was, it was not a place I wanted to spend any time. So,that was a long story to explain why I think my neighbor eats pizza.
**COMENTARY ON SINGLE BEDS***I know I live in Europe and even when you ask for a double bed at a nice hotel, it’ll probably be two single beds shoved together, I get that, but just because you’re “Single” doesn’t mean you want a single bed! It’s kind of offensive that when you’re job arranges your accommodations, as is the case with many overseas jobs, that they ALWAYS assume a single bed is appropriate. When I renewed my contract in Korea, I told them I needed at least a double bed in order to continue working for that school. I mean really, I’m not 5, I can handle a big girl bed! Besides, I have been sleeping in a double bed or larger since I was like 15. I do a least try to take in a lover at least once in a while, and I find it pretty presumptuous of employers to assume that it won’t happen often enough to warrant a larger bed! They always refer to the space quotient in the flat, I remember having a lengthy conversation with the Korean management at a former job, about which is more important, being able to do yoga in my flat, or be able to have special friends sleepover (not on the floor). What a strange conversation to be having with your boss, while elementary age children filtering past, and popping in to ask random questions about what was in today’s snack box. “Sorry kids, teacher is talking about her crappy sex life with the director and his translator that has resulted from her single bed”
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