We have a new neighbor.
Well, not really a new neighbor. She's been here since roughly the end of last summer. But she's newer than the old neighbor who moved out before she moved in.
Our neighbor has a job. A real job. She leaves the house at 8:30 every morning and gets home sometime between 5:30 and 6:30. She gets the Wall Street Journal. She has conversations on her cell phone that involve her using the words "Marketing" and "HR" and the phrase, "I'll take care of it when I get in to the office tomorrow."
I do not have a job. I am a student. The earliest class I have starts at 11:15. I have no classes on Fridays. I've been trying to wake up around 8 AM lately, but this is merely an effort on my part to get myself onto a normal person's sleep schedule. I go to bed sometime between midnight and 2 AM on weeknights. On weekends I slip into bad habits and stay up very late, sometimes as late as 7 or 8 in the morning (hence trying to get myself onto a normal person's sleep schedule).
Our television is in the living room, against the western wall. Our neighbor lives on the other side of our western wall. I don't know how her apartment is laid out, but apparently her bedroom is in the position where our living room is. She has placed her bed against her eastern wall, which is our western wall.
This has led to an unfortunate situation: at nights, when she is sleeping, there is no volume at which our television can be set that satisfies the following two conditions: 1. it is loud enough that we can hear it. 2. it is not so loud that it keeps her awake. There are, in fact, volumes that we have set it at such that we are struggling to hear dialogue, only to have our neighbor rap loudly on the wall to indicate her displeasure at the raging cacophany emerging from our apartment. On a number of occasions she has come over and rung our doorbell to give us a lecture that she is a Very Important Person with a Very Important Job and could we please turn our television off?
This has led to a certain... curtness to our relations with her. As an example, I did the laundry the other day and found myself putting my clothes in the wash while she folded her clothes. When she came in and saw me she glared, then ignored me. She finished just before I did and headed to the elevator. I was a few feet behind and she tried to close the elevator before I got into it. She failed. We got to the third floor and had difficulty opening the outer door with her hands full. I helped push the door open and she quickly brushed past, without a word, and went into her apartment.
But, of course, I can't say that my roommate and I haven't been similarly antisocial towards her.
In the interest of accomodation, I recently purchased a new television which has among its features a headphone jack. Coupling that with my headphone cord extension cable, I've resolved most of our problem with noise at night.
I'm thinking, though, that it might be nice to try to confront our sour relationship and try to improve things. In that spirit, I'm planning to bake cookies for our neighbor this weekend. My plan is to take them over, introduce myself, apologize for the noise issues, and generally try to smooth things over.
At best, this could result in friendship and better inter-apartment relations. At worst, she'll react curtly and I will be able to live happily with my cookies and the knowledge that I am the bigger person. I'm not seeing a downside right now.
