I’ve been browsing my own posts here and I only have this to say: I swear I’m not this hokey, sappy, and self-helpy in real life. I once purposely scowled at an old man who once told me to cheer up. And the boy I’m in love with cracked a joke the other day likening me to the wise stepmom he wanted to bang, and I was only mildly offended. See, I can be tough when I want to be!
But let me tell you a little something about where I live. I live in an especially crowded area of Los Angeles, and my neighborhood is certainly not one of the more glamorous ones. Not to say it’s as bad as some of the other stories you hear about LA. It may be a little run-down and dirty and a high-traffic area of the city, and maybe the stairwells in my building reek of a housing project, but I feel safe here. My building is a pretty well-rounded mix of Mexicans, Koreans, and Filipinos, and they’re usually old folks or families. No out of control parties, no stray bullets, nobody even harassing me on my way to the bus stop. It’s not a bad deal.
But this is a drastically different tune from the one I was singing a few days ago. I grew up in the suburbs — what’s more, I always lived in quiet suburbs, and besides the parking situation here in Los Angeles, the only other thing I’ve had trouble adjusting to is the noise level. There’s one place across the way that plays reggaeton all loud late into Friday nights, and then there’s my next door neighbor playing bachata all loud at 9 every Saturday morning. There are always kids racing and stomping down the hallways here, or this one rotten ass kid constantly wailing away two floors up about how he doesn’t wanna take a bath. And the walls here are thinner than any other apartment I’ve been in, so thin that I can hear somebody using the vacuum cleaner upstairs and somebody else’s phone ringing across the hall.
This was especially frustrating this past month because of all the stress I’ve been dealing with. I’d get home from work after a day of mindnumbing tasks, and all I’d want to do is plop on the couch, unwind, and read a book or write or something, but hearing somebody stomp around upstairs or the music across the way would always break my concentration and stress me out even more. The only way I was able to drown this out for the sake of my own sanity was to put my headphones on and listen to music, but I need to have some semblance of quiet when I write, so this still kept me from being able to concentrate on anything.
So naturally, after an unsuccessful attempt at makeshift earmuffs using cotton balls and electrical tape, I had to bitch about this to my cousin over the phone. He came up with the brilliant idea of getting an ambient noise CD, the kind that people buy to put themselves to sleep, an idea so brilliant I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it myself.
I spent most of the day in on Sunday, which is something I’ve had loads of trouble doing on the weekends cause everybody’s home making a racket. And what’s more was that I was actually able to get work done. I get home from the job with my brain fried, and once I pop this thing in iTunes, I can actually do stuff again. It’s not just about drowning out the noise, either. I’m in such a better mood that I don’t even yell at other drivers anymore. This lame ass CD I have of a rainstorm in Hawaii which I actually picked up in the “New Age” section (*cringe*) of Amoeba has totally transformed my life, and I’d recommend it to anybody who all too often fantasizes about bitchslapping their upstairs neighbors.
