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I'll have that in a vente to go

It's come to my attention lately that I have become well-known for angry, bitchy rants- at least, well-known in this way to Tyler's entire family. But honestly, I know how to restrain myself during most confrontations with others. For example, below is what I would love more than anything to say to the people upstairs at this very moment. However, even though all hell has broken loose and they scream at me regularly, every time I knock on their door at three in the morning I continue to plaster a toothy (and hopefully creepy) smile on my face while I politely tell them to keep the noise down because I would really like to be sleeping rather than standing on their porch in my pajamas and slippers as it rains.

Sarah- I don't like you. Even though I've never seen your face, I don't like you. Why? Mostly because you scream a lot at ungodly hours of the night for no apparent reason. I guess your inner two year-old never left and you have an uncontrollable urge to scream. I, too, have mental problems. The kind where I'm supposed to be going to a counselor and popping pills that make me happy. However, I can't sympathize with how you let the angry spirit of a two year-old infest your mind. Despite my mental problems, I'm uninsured and unemployed and not getting the help people have told me I need. However, I don't let it bother my neighbors. I'm sorry, but if you had a real reason to scream, I'd be less inclined to hold it against you. I once had a neighbor who did have a reason to scream, and I hated her boyfriend, not her. Screaming just to hear the sound of your shrill, loud, unintelligible voice makes people hate you. Despite what you think, it's not endearing. In reality, all those people who might laugh when you scream say mean and horrible things about you behind your back. Sometimes, they even say it on your porch.

And while we're on the subject of your "friends" standing on your porch, which happens to be above my bedroom window; I also don't like you because of those friends. You know, the ones who stand on your porch (above my bedroom window) after midnight and scream shrilly on their cellphones- sounding like sorority girls on crack. Yeah, those friends. The same people who say mean things about you behind your back, and often on your porch while talking on their cellphones.

But I'll be honest with you, my strong dislike for you is not completely fair. A large portion of it is because of your husband. Every time I trudge up to your apartment in my pajamas to complain about the two in the morning frat party you're hosting above my bedroom in your spacious, well-insulated, three bedroom, two-story apartment that just you and your husband live in, that pasty, weasel-faced clod has the amazing talent of giving me nasty vibes before he even opens the door. And to rub salt in the wound, he only opens the door so he can then slam it in my face. I also can't forget that incident with his mother screaming at me from behind your pasty, weasel-faced significant other while he slammed the door in my face. Because she also had a weasel face, I know that woman was his mother, and not yours. But... you married the jerk, so you can't be much better.

Anyway, by stomping around angrily just because I played music at 6 PM to blot out every painful word of your droll phone conversation, you just increased my hatred for you. Yeah, so what if my window was open, so was yours. Sorry to shatter your fragile conception of yourself, but my music was no louder then when you randomly scream well beyond a reasonable hour. Did you forget about that second story you have? You know, the one above your dinning room? The second story where you surely can't hear my music because of the super high-quality insulation and the fact that the music wasn't playing at even half the volume capacity of my boyfriend's computer?

Sending the angry, paste weasel to complain was a low blow. Do you realize he didn't bother to knock on my door? He stood in front of my window and glared at me with his demonic red-rimmed eyes before stomping away. The man didn't even say a word. I sure hope you didn't marry that ugly vampire weasel just so he could be your lackey. Really, if you have a problem with my music because it's not Sarah McLachlan and I'm not blasting it above someone else's bedroom at one in the morning on a weeknight, come down here and tell me yourself, bitch. Puh-lease!

All Thanks To A Dumbass

At five in the morning, the fire department busted our door in because our neighbor is a dumbass. At first, when Tyler and I were awakened by the banging of what I presume was our door being busted in, we thought it was JamesandSarah being their usual annoying selves and making extreme noise at an ungodly hour. It's happened before.

Anyway, here's some photos of the sorry state of our door. I'll write a more detailed account later, after I recover from the rage at the fact that our next-door neighbor caused this by taking out the batteries in all five of his fire alarms and by burning something so strong that it woke up one of the other neighbors who thought it was a fire. If I see that dumbass today, I swear I'm going to castrate him.

According to the Canadians, "anger is a healthy and valid emotion"

Sure, and the day I post this— the day I fucking write this post— this asshole comes along and hotlinks one of my photos in question. In fact, he actually had the nerve to hotlink a photo I renamed "fuckyounohotlinking.jpg"! But the worst part about it is that he hotlinks it in a comment on someone else's shitty ass MySpace site so I can't very well replace the image with something fitting of my deep rooted, hate festering anger.

Has he no soul? Has he no decency? What are the chances? What are the chances?

Don't mind me; I'm just stressed and depressed. I'll get over it once Spring comes along and I actually graduate fucking college. Perhaps I'll even get over it sooner- assuming I find some time to pick up some jasmine-lemon bubble tea.

Though, most likely, I merely need to scream "fuck" at the top of my voice over and over again until the anal-retentive neighbor upstairs who likes to exercise at 12 fucking O'clock at night comes down to bitch me out for screaming so much. 'Cause god knows, I'll feel better when I yell "fuck you, asshole neighbor who is fucking louder than I ever will be" to his weasel ass. I mean really, only anal-retentive pricks name their wireless network "JamesandSarah" so I know their fucking names and can slander them on the internet. Only asshole anal-retentive pricks who think it's funny to move their fucking furniture above my bedroom at 2 in the fucking morning so they can vacuum their carpet at 2:30 in the fucking morning are put on this planet so I can cuss them out and feel better about my life.

I dare you to come down here and yell at me "JamesandSarah", you anal-retentive bitch of a man-slut. Oh, I dare you.

P.S. This time I'm not drunk, just angry.

Short-Term

Each summer, the full-time staff members where I work leave me to run the office while they go on a retreat somewhere nice, quiet and relaxing. During that time, they relax and have fun, but also do a bunch of boring team-building projects such as making shrinky-dink mobiles depicting objects and words that they feel define them. They also do other kindergarten-related projects such as creating a recipe for the workplace that contains a cup of respect and a tablespoon of good humor, etc. Meanwhile, I sit in a deserted building, drumming my fingers and cursing the internet for it's inability to entertain me longer than an hour. Between curses, I answer phone calls from orthodox Jews planning a visit to Seattle from New York who expect me to be their travel agent and find the nearest synagogue within walking distance to their hotel downtown (there are none) and to also create a day-by-day itinerary of kosher eateries within walking distance from their downtown hotel (there are none). No, I'm not the least bit bitter that I don't get to join spend two days in a quiet and relaxing vacation area such as Palm Springs and get paid to cut watermelons artistically and swim in a pool.

When the staff returns from their two days of peace, quiet, and camp activities, I inevitably end up with a large stack of paper scraps with encrypted short-term and long-term goals for each staff member. I am then expected to decrypt handwriting worse than a doctor's and neatly type and organize various goals in a word document which I then save in each staff member's respective folder on our shared network. It sounds like boring drudge work, but it's much more interesting than sitting around for two eight hour days and finding that the only entertainment is scraping a year's worth of dust from my computer- dust that started collecting after the last staff retreat. Besides, I get to pry into not only the career goals of my fellow workers, but also their personal goals. There ain't nothin' better about learning such juicy tidbits as who is planning to move, how many kids they plan on having and when, and the fact that So-and-so's goal is to learn to relax and take more personal time off in the next few years.

I'm not really a goal setting person, and I didn't learn the true business-clogged meaning of the words "Goal" and "Value" until the later years of Junior High when, much like a pop-quiz I wasn't prepared for, I was expected to make a word cluster of my "Goals" and "Values". When the teacher presented the class with this task, I went numb, caught in the headlights of confusion. Given the blank stares directed at the teacher and the overall silence of a typically obnoxious class, my fellow students apparently felt the same way. "Goal" was an easy word- it was like the goal line in tag soccer. But "Value" presented another problem. It was a word we were expected to know and comprehend, and although most of us knew the dictionary definition, the application into business terminology was on an entirely unattainable level. To make things worse, our Junior High was particularly vicious, and not knowing something so basic- something we all knew must be basic- was a death sentence. "Psst. What's a 'value'?" someone whispered nearby, not wanting to ask the teacher such a stupid question. Lucky for her, she was popular and was safe from loosing any shred of reputation by asking The Question. "Ummm... I think it's- uh- like, things you care about. Religious things, and shit like that," was the answer from a less popular student. It was then, for the first time in my life, that I learned what a "Value" was.

val-ue n.: something one cares about, often religious, or other important shit like that.

The words I would have chosen for my cluster would have been generic things like: family, friends, health and so on under "Values". Improving my skill as a violinist, getting better grades, and surviving Junior High were probably what I had for goals. These days, my goals are much more obscure. Sometimes, especially when thinking about the general goals that most of the people around me seem to express (graduating college, going to graduate school or finding a job, getting married, having children), I realize that my goals are quite absurd. So, in case you cared, here's a list of a few of my short-term goals.

I Eat Screaming Little Girls

Last night, my sleep was plagued with a continuous chorus of screaming girls. The perspective of time is next to impossible to gauge while sleeping, but it seemed like every half an hour or so the chorus would shriek, an image of non-descript girls clustered together and holding their faces in the fashion of "Banging in the Nails", which I have subconsciously attributed to these neighbors, started ringing through my head. After a couple of "I'm bang bang bang bang banging in the nails," I found myself overtaken with an inexplicable urge to fiddle with their cross and turn it upside down. At about the moment my fingers started to twitch uncontrollably with the desire of such an un-neighborly deed, The Elephant opened the door.

She peered from behind the door, not moving past the threshold of her home to talk with me. I tried as politely as possible to explain that the noise her daughter and her friends made was rather loud last night and this morning.

"Oh, well we had a sleep-over," she explained.

"Yes, I could tell. I'm just letting you know that we could hear them screaming all night long and I have to work today. I'm really tired and cranky because of it."

"Girls. Girls, you need to hear this. This lady lives downstairs and could hear the noise you made last night," she said, turning to her oldest daughter and her friends. All I could see was the back of the oldest daughter who was lounging on the couch. The girl turned slightly to look at me with a dulled look and then turned back to the TV.

"Hmm� Well, I should be going to work now," I told The Elephant.

Clearly distressed, she repeatedly opened and closed her mouth, stepped onto the porch and then jumped back to the other side of the door. It looked like she wanted to say something, so I stopped and waited. She fumbled with her words for a moment and then muttered something awkward that I couldn't hear. I started to turn again, but she stepped back onto the porch, jumping immediately back to the other side of the door. I stopped again, waiting for her to say something, at which point she fumbled with her words for a moment and then muttered something I couldn't make out. I decided that my presence troubled her and that this hopping from the porch back to the protective barrier of her apartments threshold was something that would continue unless I left. So, I said my goodbyes and told her that the noise wasn't a huge deal but that I wanted them to know we could hear it. I stole one last glance at the oldest daughter who continued to stare ahead at the TV. As my footsteps reverberated off the metal porch steps, I started to sing "I eat scream-ing little gir-ls." I doubt they heard me, but perhaps I should swing by their apartment to see if there's another cross hanging on their door to ward against me.

An Elephant for a Neighbor

"Now, I have to warn you," she started when describing the apartment we had decided to take, "the person there now is moving because a family lives above him. They have two children, so they can be noisy."

Tyler and I looked at each other, the memories of our up-stairs neighbors from the Apartment from Hell flashing through our brain synapses.

I laughed. "A family can't be worse than the people who used to live above us. Their stairs went right over our bedroom and they always came home loud and drunk at 3 AM." They also yelled and broke furniture and scared the shit out of me when I was living there alone for a summer and called the cops to report the sounds of abuse.

"Oh, well if you guys are heavy sleepers and don't mind a little noise during the day, then it shouldn't be a problem." We both anxiously reassured her that we'd be fine. After all, a family isn't typically going to be making loud noises at 3 AM and a little noise during the day won't hurt.

And the family isn't as bad as the abusive drunks that used to live above us, even though their peak noise hour is when Tyler and I are still trying to sleep in the mornings. However, some of the noises they make are particularly annoying, such as the constant banging sound immediately above our heads that lasts for about a half hour every morning. Sometimes the sound lasts even longer, at which point the song "Banging in the Nails" by the Tiger Lillies starts looping through my mind. Then there's the sound of chairs/stools scraping across tiled floor. I originally thought this was also immediately above our heads, but I realized soon after moving in that the sound is probably above our living room and can be heard equally loud from any point in our apartment.

But the oddest of the noises would have to be the one member of the family who walks so heavily that their elephantine footsteps reverberate off our walls, shaking everything hanging from or near to any given wall in our apartment. The entire family is petite, so I was often perplexed by the footsteps every time I heard them. I originally thought the sounds were one of the children stomping around. But then I realized one day, while the kids were playing outside and the footsteps continued crushing everything in their wake upstairs, that it couldn't be the kids. I then attributed the crashing sounds to the father- the next logical step considering he's always in a hurry and seems like the type to walk heavily despite his small stature. But as I lay in my bed this morning with the blinds partly drawn to let the plants on my windowsill enjoy the sun, I heard the deafening sound of the footsteps crush their way towards the upstairs door. Soon the sound of heavy steps echoing against the metal porch rang though the dull ache of my head and I looked out the window to see the mother of the family leaving- alone.

So now that I know the truth, I'm even more perplexed.

Snapshot

Imagine, if you will, attending to your utmost private business in the sanctity of your personal bathroom while positioned immediately above you is a large stereo system that sings inspirational music. Just as you complete your utmost private business and finish washing your hands, you notice- thank God- that the music has stopped. You continue on with your daily morning routine (or lack thereof, in my case) and begin brushing your teeth to the hum of a free Sonicare you scored off a rabbi three years prior. Over the high pitched drone of your glorious toothbrush, the voices of inspired women rise once again in their vain attempt to sound like angels.