I heart my upstairs neighbor!

Bad neighbor situations suck. I know, because I've had my share. I had this neighbor, when I lived abroad, who'd decided to go out one night and leave her new yappy dog at home. Of course it barked incessantly until she came home. I lay in wait! When she returned (at 4 am on a weeknight), I ran to her door. When I told her that the dog had been yapping since she left, she looked at me, and said,

"What am I supposed to do, stay home every night?"

This entire conversation happened in a foreign language. Have you ever tried speaking coherently in a foreign language while livid? I'd say it's pretty high on the list of extremely challenging cognitive endeavors. I'm pretty sure I just stood there blinking for a while before switching to some colorful English.

So I won't bore you with my many other "bad neighbor" stories. Instead I'll bore you with my "best neighbor" story! Yay! We'll call her "X." I told X that I could hear her walking above me at 5:30am every morning, and she figured out it was her loud shoes, immediately switching to softer soles. I noticed a mysterious vibration in one corner of my bedroom over the last few nights; together we discovered that it was her oscillating fan, and she turned it off. Every time she sees me, she asks with genuine concern about the noise situation!

Now I feel really badly about having asked her to close the doors more gently...because further investigation has revealed that the door slammer is my downstairs neighbor, whom we'll call "Y."

Wow, X must be miserable. Whatever it is that she's calling me in her blog, I'm sure it has an "!" and a "#" in it.