midnight musings

Here I am in the middle of the night. I was awakened by intense sadness and have been crying my eyes out over this broken heart I have left over from the summer. I think it was truly broken, too, because off and on I have these breathing problems and they've been bad the last few days--they started the last day I saw him in June. I started to write him a blog entry/letter but decided, wisely, against posting it. I thought I was a lot better, and I think I am, but sometimes I wonder how I've lived through this and how I will ever fully recover. I honestly don't think it's possible.

Cosmic love totally blows. You know, maybe if someone, erm, "did him in," I could breathe again? :) Just kidding.

Anyway, my upstairs neighbor has been a bit noisy tonight. She's stomping around like a baby elephant. It's hard to hear things through most of the walls and floors of this place. But over the summer, a different person lived there, a guy. He was OK for a couple of months, but through the summer, he kept scraping his chair on the floor. And by scraping his chair, I mean he was sitting with his full weight in it, making it screech. What was particularly unusual about his behavior was that he would screech his chair *every fifteen minutes.* I'm not exaggerating. Furthermore, he would do this every fifteen minutes from about eleven at night until about 2 in the afternoon. Close to round the clock. I had to wonder if he was learning a floor routine with a chair. Ear plugs didn't work for this little problem, either.

One night I got fed up and went up there around 3 AM to ask him if he wouldn't mind lifting his weight a bit out of the chair when he shifted it. I was personally raised not to move a chair with my full weight in it and to lift my weight off of it and lift the chair itself when shifting its position--this was so we wouldn't ruin the floors. Clearly this guy wasn't taught similarly. So I went up there and knocked on his door. He was blasting heavy metal music and yelling some conversation on the phone. He yelled, "Just a minute," and after a good long time, came to the door, at which time he explained, "I'm sorry, I was in the shower." I thought that was very odd, and I asked him to please not screech his chair on the floor. The problem never got better and I reported it to the grad assistant community advisor whose job it is to handle these complaints.

So here's where it gets silly. The community advisor talked to my neighbor and he told her that it must be someone else screeching his chair across the floor all the time, because he was asleep when I went up there (!). Furthermore, he told her that he was going on a walk with some of his friends during the next hour and that I should sit in my room and see if I heard anything from any other neighbors!. Needless to say, I didn't hear a thing. I told the community advisor my side of how I'd asked him to be quiet that night, and she must have reported it back to him, and after that the situation improved considerably. What a weirdo.