A capital "N"....

...can stand for so many things.
For one thing, it's the latest Letter. While reading an article about noisy neighbors with my boyfriend, my vision blurred for a tiny moment (come on- i was still drinking my morning coffee!), and an "N" was revealed to me within the blank spaces between the words, with the line breaks helping out along the way. I can't find the original article now, so i'll have to try and recreate what i saw within the lines of this post. Not sure how easy that's going to be, but i'll give it a whirl.*

Another thing "N" can stand for is Neighbor. As in, the extremely loud ones who live above us in this building. Now, i have a confession to make, one which i'm sure will incur the wrath (or at least an eye-roll or exasperated sigh) of almost anyone reading this: we currently do not pay rent. And by 'currently', i mean for almost the last year and a half. ::ducks to avoid icy glares:: And yes, i understand more than a lot of people how amazing this is, and how lucky i am, and believe me i am grateful. I've paid rent on apartments since i was 18, for about ten years, so when my aunt (who owns this condo) said we could stay here free until i got a job, i was pretty quick to accept. We'll talk more about why i'm not working yet later.

So does this good fortune mean i have to tolerate the constant stomping across the floor, slamming of doors and windows, dragging of furniture, toilet seat lids banging down, and amorous romps- complete with bed headboard banging repeatedly into the wall- at 2:30 in the morning? i honestly don't think so. However, this is me we're talkin' about, so of course it makes me feel guilty, and of course i feel like i should just have to deal with it. But honestly, i'm trying to get beyond this self-loathing doormat martyr business. It is a soul-sucking way to live.
Moving on. A few months ago, nat and i got into such a huge fight over the noise coming from upstairs- he likes to pound on the ceiling; i feel mortified by that, and feel that it's actually causing more problems- that i left our apartment in a huff, slammed the door (so the people upstairs would think i was coming up to break their knees), and went up there to talk to them.
Turns out the lady who lives up there is super nice, of course. Right off the bat i say, "hi, i'm your neighbor from downstairs. the one who just banged on the ceiling?" and proceed to explain my case. She seemed baffled, and could not believe that they were making any noise (i could see a guy sitting on the couch in the living room, his back to us; apparently he couldn't stomach being involved in this discussion), and told me that she moved to this part of the building because of noise problems herself. i explained that nat is a student, and studies at home a lot because cafes can be noisy; she attempted to assuage my fears by saying that she was a student too, and also had to study at home a lot.
So after a few minutes, most of which i barely remember because my blood was pumping so hard (this is not something Normal Heather ever does), i think we ended up parting on an amicable note, astonishingly, and she said that they would try to be more conscious of noise. And for a few months, it was actually pretty blissful! Not much more than an occasional footstep or drawer being slammed was heard from our apartment.
The past month or two, however, has been a completely different story. She'd click around in her high heels on saturday nights, parading before the mirror (every unit is the same; i know that's what she's doing, because we have the same damned mirrored closet by our front door) and making a general ruckus, before returning home in the wee hours of the morning with what we suspected was a different guy almost every week. They would stumble around for awhile, slamming things and dropping bowling balls hither and thither. Then La Pasion would commence, and the bed would begin thumping loudly against the wall, either waking us up or keeping us from getting to sleep- sometimes for hours. And hey! more power to her. But fuck. It would be nice to get some sleep, you know?
On and on this has gone, until a few days ago they had friends staying with them or something, which turned out to be the proverbial Straw. It was an almighty cacophony up there; an insufferable din. A barrage of the usual stomping, slamming, dragging, dropping, and many other new, irritating, undefinable sounds. i am really not being overly dramatic about this. It was painfully difficult to be in the apartment while this was going on; it was impossible to concentrate on anything else without our upstairs neighbors being on our brains. It's like i told nat: just for ONE DAY, i would love to live down here without feeling like my neighbors live right in the room with us. i am sure some people reading this know exactly what i mean.
So i broke down. i wrote them A Note. The Note mentioned all of the aforementioned issues, worded as tactfully as possible, and with all the scraping and bowing i could muster, because i absolutely did not want to exacerbate the situation. And because of the noisy sex issue, i couldn't go up there and talk to her about it face to face. No way. i mentioned how gracious she was about all of this in the past, but that it has escalated to a constant daily stress, and that i just wanted them to know, in case they could keep it in check a little better. Sometimes people don't even know that they're being loud, true? Like once, nat and i got a letter from our downstairs neighbor, saying that we were so loud that it was actually ruining her life. I remember being utterly shocked by this information, and swearing from that moment on to always walk lightly, not raise my voice too loudly, etc. etc.
She ended up moving out very soon after that; i think her mind was probably already made up when she wrote the note, whether she knows it or not. But that lesson has stayed with me to this day! We live above someone, too, and believe me when i say that i am aware of this fact every minute of every day. And no, it's not really a hassle. You just evolve your habits, you know? i close the cupboards carefully instead of letting them fall shut themselves, close doors quietly and open/shut the windows slowly so they don't make that awful screeching sound that you can probably hear all the way out on Mars.
(wow, i just realized how boring this post is- can you people ever forgive me? i suppose i just needed to vent my frustration for a moment... presumably my last post just wasn't enough. also, sorry for using parentheses so much. it's a really bad habit, much like my overzealous use of the Semicolon.)
Needless to say, i understand that there are people living above me, and below me, and next door to me, and that i will hear them from time to time. But this has moved into different territory. My concern right now is that The Note only made things worse. For the past few days, i feel like there has been more and more and more stomping and slamming... Either the guilt is slowly eroding away my sanity, or i never had any sanity to begin with.

*My "N" project proved much more difficult to intentionally format than i thought; here is a mock-up, with a really asinine storyline:

......Once uponaday there
......was a woman thatlived
......ina fair castle withher
..prince and his21 catswho
.....had blue eyes andgrey
....fur which was reallyjust
.....so lovely, an articlewaswritten
....on themto a newspaper
whichwasreadbythewholekingdom.

..so there ya go! If you squint your eyes, or look at that from a low angle, you should be able to see an "N". i've been noticing these patterns within books for a long time now, and always wanted to do something artistic with them, but i've not thought of a great way to do that just yet. Will keep y'all posted.
::hands out huckleberry daiquiris to all who made it this far::

next time: rememberances of people past.