"Oh, Tanis," you say. "Surely it can't be that bad!" Let me assure you that it is. I like to stay up late, okay? Why? So I can spend time with my two main late-night squeezes Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien, okay? So I don't get to bed until super late.
The people who live below me are early risers and they hit the sack as early as 10 p.m. I hear them running water around then, so I'm going to assume that's what they're doing. Maybe they just like to brush their teeth a lot. I don't know. Anyway, the point is, they go to bed early. And if I can hear your droning bathroom fan through a floor, surely it must be keeping you up being as it's in the next room!
I shouldn't complain. The fact that they have that fan on tells me that they're relatively non-smelly people. Which is a vast improvement over the people who used to live below me. They had five cats. Which, I'm assuming, were used to cover up the omnipresent stench of their skunky teenage pot. When they moved out, they left the place in a shambles.
I know because they moved out in secret one night and left a light on and their door open. I got home late one night and went in to shut the light off. There was dirt and paper everywhere. Kitty litter, mud, crumbs and a layer of dust in the kitchen, soap scum, whiskers and more dirt in the bathroom. I went in the bathroom because they'd also left that light on and also, the tap was dripping. So I took care of that because I'm a nice person.
Not nice enough to help clean that hell hole, but still, pretty nice.
Happy as I am to no longer be living above a group of teenage miscreants wallowing in their own crapulence, the fastidious couple who now live there need to think about me and how I go to sleep late and would like to drift off to the pleasant sound of the Chairman Meow purring on the pillow next to me, not the distant "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" of their bathroom fan.
Perhaps I should knock on their door. And say: "Pardon me, but I live above you. I'd like to apologize for apparently wronging one of your people from the old country in a past life. Rest assured, I've been well and thoroughly punished for it, so you can quit with the torture of the bathroom fan now."
Or maybe something like "I work the graveyard shift, so could you maybe turn off your loud as shit fan so I can sleep? Thanks!"
Oh, but I won't do that. Me no likey the confrontation. And also: Loud as shit? WTF? I swear too much. I realized this the other day when I said "cocksucker" out loud at work in reference to my computer. Now, throwing the word cocksucker down in a newsroom is not entirely unheard of, but it still raises some eyebrows. Oh, not among the sports guys, but certainly it's frowned upon in polite society. But to be fair, my computer really was being a motherfucking cocksucking bitch.
I like swearing. There's nothing better than responding to something ridiculous with a derisive "fuck that noise!" is there? I mean, it's the perfect comeback. Way better than fuck you.
But really, it's a lazy way of expressing oneself. Not as lazy as saying Fudge or Fooey, but lazy, nonetheless. So I try to be creative, slipping swears in where I'm not supposed to. Like saying 'loud as shit.' I say 'Fuck Me' a lot too.
Like tonight. I was going to make pizza when I got home from work, but realized I had no cooking oil. But I'd already measured the flour in a bowl. And so I said "Fuck me!" Because, well, I was fucked! Stupid sexy cooking oil.
If my cat could pick up words, he'd have the vocabulary of a sailor on shore leave.
You know, thinking back on it, I've been this way forever. I got my mouth washed out with soap by my grandmother when I was two for saying that the dogs were "out back, fucking around."
I'd heard my dad and my God father say it when I asked them what the dogs were doing on the lawn (fucking) and my God father said without thinking "They're just fucking around." So when my dog barked one night, and my Grandma said "What's that all about?" I said "That's just the dogs out fucking around."
It may have been Easter Sunday dinner. My dad and God father may have laughed. Whatever. They weren't the ones who had to pick slivers of Dial out of their mouths.
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