Friday, March 16, 2007

Idlely Contemplating Homicide

I know that in the chance that I become the next Darren Kliebold or Timothy McVeigh that making such off-hand comments in my blog posts as 'Idlely Contemplating Homicide' is somewhere between 'big no-no' & 'early warning sign.' But I swear, it's entirely made as a light-hearted hyperbolic statement of frustration.

Erin is driving me bananas.

My upstairs neighbour is gone for two months and the apartment is being sublet by Erin Matthews - who, like practically everyone in my building, I've known at least casually for several years.
When Patrick and Graham left I was entirely out of the loop, but I noticed the change in noise patterns from upstairs. Within a day or so, Matthew mentioned that Erin was subletting. For starters there were no really disruptive sounds.
Then, a week in I ran into her in the stairwell. We said 'hi' and I mentioned that I had heard her up there, and added that I didn't mean it in a bad way.

It was as though I gave her permission.

One morning there was yelling before 8am.
She never seems to take her shoes off (which are apparently dutch-clogs) and I never imagined that dancers could be so fucking heavy-footed. Okay to be fair - nine times out of ten it takes her in excess of a half hour to take them off after getting in the door. It also seems that she puts them on as soon as she gets out of bed - I guess she wears them in the shower? Oh... and there are hardwood floors.

She's a heavy smoker which means I'm constantly hearing the sliding door rumble open as she goes out to the balcony. I'm only complaining about this one in the context of the perponderance of other factors.

She is a very loud talker when she's excited - which luckily I usually only hear on her way into the building from the street.

I also would never want to complain about this one unless it was a regular issue - which in very nearly is and again, with everything else... Noisy sex at 6:30 in the morning. Three days in a row. Made worse by the fact that it coincided perfectly with a bout of insomnia, cutting my sleep opportunities over three days to approximately half. Oh wheee!

One morning she put the stereo on first thing in the morning and left it on after she left the house - it was on repeat. Augh!

Now we move into the more egrigious stuff...

Lucky her she got a cool voice over gig. And she does fucking vocal warm ups in the bedroom above where I sleep when she wakes up. FUCK!

And...

Two or three times now there has been this semi-rhythmic thumping (not sex, I'm quite certain). It kind of sounds as though she's sitting where her legs are not quite reaching the ground and she's swinging them. It's not that loud. If it was only ten minutes, I'd probably never notice - but for three hours at a time it gets really fucking annoying. I got fed up with it one night last week.

I've been trying to avoid opening that particular can of worms for various reasons (not the least of which is that now that I know how loud a person can be, I'm wondering how loud I am and don't really want Erin angrily complaining to Patrick and Graham about me when they return only to get into a big question of hipocracy).

So I went upstairs and knocked on her door... as soon as I did, the talking inside stopped. No answer, even when I knocked again.
She figured she could pretend she wasn't home? What the fuck?
I went back downstairs. About twenty minutes later, the noise started again.

So, I'm hoping to catch her in the stairs again so she can't pretend she's not there - she can't do that can she?