Chelsea's Rant: Not Being a Good Neighbor *UPDATE*

Living in an apartment has its perks. Like the fun of finding a parking space for those who have more vehicles than spots allotted, and being able to share a single dumpster with three other buildings of inhabitants. There’s also the close proximity to others and the ability to make friends, see each other more regularly than you want and hear all the private details you’ve been wishing you could do without.

For the past six weeks, I’ve been living in a new apartment and have been provided the opportunity to really get to know my neighbors at a distance. I say at a distance because our friendship travels through their floor over my head.

At first, the tirade of verbal profanity was entertaining. I don’t have a television, so it was like having a free ticket to a new dramatic series or listening to a live lifetime movie. After a while, however, it started to wear on the nerves. Is it even possible to be that angry all the time, I found myself wondering.

Well yes, yes it is. As evidenced by the man upstairs—and on lesser occasion, the woman—there are those whose existence seems to be marked by barking one obscenity after the next. I haven't been able to ascertain whether the anger is directed at a person or an object or both, but it appears to be a mixture of the two.

So, after a good month-and-a-half of enjoyment, I decided to do something about it and composed a nice long letter, which I left on the clip on the door last night. I can only hope it was well received. Since I doubt I'm the only one whose had this great experience, I've decided to share that letter here. Let this be a message to all offending neighbors and empowring for those who have to hear it.

Dear raving tyrant,

Thank you for allowing me to take part these past six weeks in your personal life. It’s been an experience in the expansive sphere of the derogatory, and I’ve been ever more impressed at your ability to be consistently and persistently pissed off on a daily basis.

No time of day is a task for you, no hour poses a struggle: with just a brief pause of my own background noise and a half-tuned ear, every moment of silence is shattered with a boom of poor articulation and the drop of an f-bomb.

While as a journalist I can appreciate the work that goes into word selection—and would even commend you on your impressively versatile use of a single expletive—I do feel your need to so vocally and vulgarly assert yourself may be causing you to fall short of your goals, whatever they may be. I will make example of this as follows:

Commonly, people speak of the need to ‘vent anger’ or ‘blow off some steam,’ and the analogy isn’t difficult to follow. As pressure builds within an enclosure, some must be released to avoid explosion. While this practice of vocally letting off steam is widely accepted as an effective means of lowering one’s pressure, six weeks of empirical knowledge would suggest that in some cases another analogy might be more fitting, i.e, ‘stoking the fire.’

In my humble opinion as an unwilling observer, each time you draw breath to let out yet another gust of foul and ill-tempered fury you are carrying yourself further from appropriate response and in fact adding fuel to fire.

For this reason, it is my firm belief that a more suitable reaction would be to sarcastically smile when something or someone angers you. Smiling is scientifically proven to elevate mood even when it’s faked, and prior experience has shown that a good, obnoxious smile paired with sickly sweet words can be just as effective a vehicle for conveying dissatisfaction as your current method.

In closing, I would just like to add that my grandmother always said ‘evil begets evil.’ I never really considered this before—you may want to ask your pal God about it, I hear you throw his name into just about every sentence—but if that old proverb holds true, then surely good can beget good.

Thanks for reconsidering your next berating outburst.

Sincerely,

Your Neighbor downstairs

 UPDATE 11/08/2013

A week ago, fed up from a non-stop vulgar tirade penetrating my space from the apartment upstairs, I posted a note on the neighbor’s door, drawing attention to his repeat offenses.

Much to my delight and surprise, the following evening I had a note on my door expressing apology for disturbing the peace and invading my home. My neighbor explained that he has a condition for which he is seeking therapy and suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He further thanked me for drawing his attention to how loud and disruptive he’d become, and stated he’d try to tone it down in the future.

Rather than post this immediately, I figured I’d give it a week to test his candor. After all, anybody can claim sincerity, but once a habit is seated, it takes a while to turn it around. Here’s what happened:

The first couple of days were silent. I heard literally nothing except for heavy footsteps and a few brief conversations. Around day four, the cursing resurfaced, but only in brief spurts, and much quieter than before. There was no rampage. Days five and six were also similar to day four, however I heard something I’ve never heard before, and it was quite astonishing indeed: laughter!

Now, I’m not going to go and declare the guy cured, but I do commend the efforts he’s made to calm himself down, especially so dramatically and consistently. There’s been an 85 percent improvement, and that still a week later.