I think perhaps she might hate me

My landlady must hate me.

She has told me before that I am the best tenant ever, which is something I've heard from several of my landlords. I am quiet, rarely home, and I always pay my rent on time. I follow the rules, I don't cause trouble, I NEVER have parties and I almost never have friends over (probably because I have no friends), and I don't engage in any illegal activities in my home.

But for some reason, my current land lady insists on giving me the world's most awful neighbors.

When I moved here last July, there were the gay drug dealers next door, who were evicted within just a few months of my arrival. They were friends with the downstairs neighbor (whose apartment is not directly below mine, but is at the bottom of the stairway), a male prostitute who would clean their apartment and do their laundry -- I expect there was some sort of 'exchange of goods and services' going on, but I have no verification of this. In the past few months, it seems that the male prostitute has disappeared, though someone is clearly living in his apartment with his things and his cat. This is sort of unfortunate because, occupation aside (and he never had clients in his home), he was one of the very best neighbors here.

The neighbor to the other side of my apartment seems to have a very serious case of sleep apnea, which results in a snore so loud it could wake the dead -- and in fact, does wake me from a dead sleep THROUGH THE WALL in the middle of the night. But that's not his fault; these aren't late night parties, and being angry at his snore would be equivalent to me yelling at the rain for waking me at 3am on Saturday night.

After the gay drug dealers moved out, a pair of overgrown frat boys moved in, who (handsome as they were) proved to be far worse than the gay drug dealers. Fortunately, they acquiesced apologetically to my late-night, bathrobe-clad, pink-curler-headed pleadings, and better still, were gone after just a few months.

Let us not forget my downstairs neighbors, who arrived shortly after the overgrown frat boys -- half a dozen Hispanic men crammed into a tiny one bedroom apartment, who consumed no fewer than 50 lite beers per night, and left the piles of cans in front of their apartment every morning, and would never speak but they would SCREAM at each other, all windows and doors open. I twice went down in my 'please be quiet' outfit (aforementioned bathrobe and curlers) to ask them to please turn it down a notch or SEVENTEEN. I recall once, they apologized profusely, calling me "Ma'am" and repeating variations on "Sorry" like a thesaurus, though I'm not sure if this was because I was asking them to be quiet or because I'd walked up to the apartment to see one of them standing in the middle of the living room with his pants down (the rest were standing in the kitchen; I don't want to know what was going on, but it was very, very strange). After multpile efforts at 'asking politely' proved to have only the shortest-term effect, I wrote at least two complaint letters to the property manager about their incessant noise -- they held parties EVERY WEEKNIGHT that lasted til well past midnight.

Now, in spite of my being a friendless miser, I can understand the occasional weekend get-together, but to party SO loudly, SO often, I wonder how they even managed to work to pay the rent. The ruckus was quite literally making me insane -- I had already imagined the headlines: 'SAN DIEGO WOMAN BRUTALLY MURDERS NEIGHBORS,' the faces of my friends, coworkers, former landlords on the news saying, "She kept to herself a lot, but she was so polite. I never could have imagined she'd do something like this." I pictured the murder scene, something out of CSI, blood and brain matter spattered on the walls and soaked into the carpeting. And I pictured Grissom or Vincent D'Onofrio trying to unwrap my mind, to understand my motives. THIS is how crazy they made me.

And now I am again blessed with new neighbors in the former abode of the gay drug dealers. The house filled with fancy furniture and a few very boisterous, proudly Nigerian men, who have in a few short weeks walked more lovers past my door than all of my previous neighbors combined. They party almost as often as the lite-beer-drinkers downstairs, and they speak the most horrifically, dangerously misogynist words I have ever heard uttered in my life (so severe that I checked the National Sex Offender Registry list for their names after hearing their words; they were not in it).

After all this, each time the 'FOR RENT' sign pops up in front of the building, eternal optimist that I am, I hope beyond hope that for once, I will find myself with the kind of neighbor from whom I could borrow a cup of sugar.

When you interview for a job, they almost always invite you for a second (or third, or fourth) interview, or ridiculous chain of fifteen short interviews, with all the people with whom you'll be sharing offices or bosses and such. The point is to make sure you're a good fit, since personality makes up some 90% of a person's success or failure (else there would be no interview, and hiring would be based solely on the qualifications listed on the resume, plus a few fact-checking phone calls). There should be such an interview amongst neighbors when one wishes to move into a building. Qualification for residence should not be limited to an application, credit check, and 5 minute tour of the property. We are forced to go through much more to WORK with a person; it should be at least as vigorous to LIVE with someone.

I warrant that it's entirely possible that I'm an irrational miser and my perspective on acceptable neighborly conduct is completely unreasonable. As I said, I have no friends, and most nights I embody the true crazy cat lady, sitting at home alone drinking red wine and knitting while watching Law and Order and lusting after Vincent D'Onofrio (and yet I wonder why I'm single...). It is possible that, were I a friendlier, kinder, and more social person, I would not judge my neighbors so harshly, but I'm convinced that it's not just me.

Last week as I walked across the street to where my car was parked, a couple of 20-year-old boys were tossing a football in the street, and seeing me walk out of my building, stopped me to say hello and introduce themselves. This was the first time in some nine months of living here that any of my neighbors have acknowledged me (except for the strangely friendly children, who wave at me from their bicycles and let me pet their puppy).

So perhaps there is hope yet. But in the meanwhile, I grow meaner and more miserly as I am kept awake by the cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on me by my hateful landlady, in the form of the World's Most Awful Neighbors.