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Roo

As I may or may not have mentioned, I moved a couple of months ago–different apartment, same roommate, same basic neighborhood except better. There are notable differences between our old place and our new place. We no longer live literally right next to (and I use the word “literally” here to in fact mean literally, I’m not abusing it for emphasis like some people) an elevated subway line, nor do we live directly behind a McDonald’s with a huge parking lot (for NYC standards) where people of all walks of life can congregate day or night. We only live two subway stops south of where we used to, but that makes a big difference for some reason. Our neighborhood is cuter and full of restaurants and convenience stores and bars and bookstores and banks and American Apparel and all those good things (actually, I couldn’t really care less about the American Apparel, but it is there). It feels safer, even if our old neighborhood was on the whole pretty safe even though it didn’t always look it. Also, I have a bigger bedroom (which means my poor roommate has a smaller one, which I feel guilty about every time I go in there except I did have the smaller room for two years so it’s probably karmically even), we have a huge bathroom with a washer/dryer (!!), a slightly bigger kitchen (such as it is) with a dishwasher, and cable television.

There are some down sides to the new place, too. Our old building was really secure and nice inside, even though our apartment, which had obviously been neglected for years during the rental boom times when landlords could basically put nothing into an apartment and then charge obscene amounts of money for them anyway, wasn’t really. It had an elevator and really nice mailboxes so that we could actually receive packages at home. The super lived in the building, and while he was a little strange and sometimes difficult, he was pretty attentive when we called him and it was nice to have him around during emergencies, like when I accidentally got stuck in the elevator at 2 PM (true story! for another time, though, I think).

Anyway, the one big thing that I miss about our old place is how quiet it was. It was a co-op building, so most of the people who lived there owned their apartments (we rented, but from a management company that owned eight of the units)–which meant that they were varying degrees of old, because this is New York, you guys. The only people who can afford to own their own apartments are Donald Trump and a grip of septuagenarians who’ve lived here their entire lives and bought their apartments in 1960 for fifty cents. That doesn’t mean it was quiet all the time–our strange but generally sweet neighbor, Jacob, had some sort of Victrola (I’m not making this up) that he liked to play what my roommate and I referred to as “Charleston music” because we don’t know a damn thing about old timey music and it sounded like something straight out of Bright Young Things. Sometimes he took the Victrola outside and played it on the stoop (?), but most of the time it was confined to his apartment–and, thanks to our ridiculously paper thin walls, ours as well. But my room was on the other side of the apartment from the one that abutted Jacob’s apartment, so I never heard it except when I was cooking or washing dishes or something. Also, occasionally there would be a loud argument or impromptu dance party in the McDonald’s parking lot, which would disturb my slumber, but otherwise, yeah, it was pretty quiet. And we lived–literally, may I remind you–right next to the elevated train line!

Such is not the case at our new apartment. It’s on a side street, not a main drag like the last one, so you would think it’d be quieter, and at street level it is. It’s just the people who are louder. For instance, the pair of young men who live next door really love to play techno music at extreme volume whilst also blasting a subwoofer of some kind right through my walls. The people downstairs play their high volume, high bass music so loud that my roommate and I called 311 a few weeks ago and made a noise complaint–it was 2 AM on a Monday! We had to be at work in a handful of hours! Who does such a thing? There is also a family living upstairs with two very young boys (something like one and three years old), who are super active and cooped up all the time. They run around like crazy–for a while we thought they were doing construction in that apartment, that’s how loud it is. I’ve learned to ignore and live with the little boy noise, it doesn’t really bother me, but my roommate hates it–she calls them “the cretins”, and while she has sympathy for the fact that they’re active toddlers and deserve to have a yard to run around and play in instead of a 700 sq foot apartment, she also values her sleep and they basically make noise from 7 AM to 11 PM EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

I could give more examples (like the woman across the “courtyard”–really sort of an alley, even though we don’t have alleys in NY, but the space between the apartment buildings in the back–who sings opera on her fire escape on the weekends), but I think you get the picture. Suffice it to say we’re both a little on edge when it comes to noise that might disturb our precious, hard-won, too infrequent opportunities for sleep. Last night, I was just drifting off when I heard bass. I remembered my roommate’s ominous words from a few days previously (“I think our neighbors got a karaoke machine”) and flew out of my room, eyes and hair wild. “DO YOU HEAR THAT?” I demanded of my roommate, who was sitting on the couch, probably watching American Idol. “No,” she said. “But you should know, you’re lookin’ real crazy.” And I was all, “OUR NEIGHBORS WTF” and she was all, “I KNOW, RIGHT?” and then it stopped.

“Um, I think they heard you yelling,” she said.

“Oh well. G’nite!”

Rude. IT IS ALMOST ONE O’ CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON A THURSDAY. What is wrong with people? Don’t they have jobs? Don’t they like to sleep? I like to sleep. In fact, I like it a lot. I like it peaceful and quiet and dark. Is that too much to ask, at one in the morning on a Thursday? IS IT?

• Filed under: random
• Tagged: Anna's boring life, New York City