What makes a good neighbor?
Good neighbors can definitely add to one’s quality of life. For me, this statement is mostly theoretical since, in so many of the places I’ve lived, I wouldn’t have described my neighbors as good. Even when they weren’t bad, so many of them were just annoying, and so my view of my neighbors was shaded dark grey.
That’s a preamble to several blog posts, since I have been meaning to narrate some stories of some of my living situations, notably in Columbus and Berkeley. But let me start here with two examples of bad neighbors to get the ball rolling.
When I first moved to Berkeley, I made it easy on myself by arranging to live in the International House dorm. I mean, of course, residence hall; as a professor we were instructed not to call them dorms or cafeterias (which are “dining halls”). Anyway, the guy living next to me, during the course of the first semester, became involved with a woman named Kate.
I know her name was Kate because when they were having sex, he would moan her name. Over and over again. From the sound of it, they were having the most intense sexual relations. However, when I was trying to read a play or some dense critical work (like Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) it was very distracting, and sometimes (since we had everyone’s phone numbers in a directory) I would dial his number. (Yes, I know this violates the Golden Rule which I extolled in another blog post, but I was younger and had trouble concentrating.) However, the phone ringing didn’t just distract him; he would stop, get up, cross the room, and answer it. “Hello? Hello?” I would have, of course, hung up by then, hearing his footsteps across the room. I surmise that the sex wasn’t that great if he would stop for a phone call.
In my second year at Berkeley, I rented an apartment so that when my then-girlfriend, later-wife would move out, we’d have a place together. A man in his thirties (I’m guessing) lived directly above us on the second floor. The first problem with that was that he had a rowing machine for exercise. Imagine hearing that rocking and rolling back and forth in the early morning. Then, noisy sex would sometimes happen in the evening with his girlfriend. I heard no vocalizations from them, so I can’t report on her name, but the intensity of the bed banging up and down certainly supplied enough distracting noise. Now, here, footsteps also became key: when they would finish, she (I’m assuming) would jump up and run to the bathroom.
Maybe TMI: When I have great—or even just good—sex, I pretty much collapse after. As I’ve gotten older, it’s partly due to my wrists not being able to support me without pain after the passion has diminished. It’s also due to that wow factor, and needing to take a moment (or more!) to recover and get my resting heart rate back. So those two people baffled me in their reactions, not to mention finding themselves in the noisy (and therefore not good) neighbor category.
MUSOFYR 