I Admit I'm Powerless Over Neighbor Noise and Ask My Higher Power To Help Me Find A New Apartment

Lately, I've been living my life with earplugs inserted. I wear them so much that I have forgotten they were in and wondered, of a groggy morning, why I couldn't hear myself peeing. Yesterday, I almost stepped into the shower with them. On the days when I don't go to school and stay home to work on my book, I never take the earplugs out.
If you've been reading my blog for a while, you already know that I live in an 'interesting' building in Paris. Ugly on the outside. Ugly on the inside. Could possibly be condemned some day (like Monday). But I just don't pay attention to all of that because the rent's cheap and the residents will keep me busy with writing fodder for many years to come. But lately, they have forced me into Earplug Overuse.
In the courtyard below my window, there's my partner in crime, 'G' and her miniature daughter, the Divine Miss M. I can hear everything going on down there, including the cat meowing to get back in, Miss M riding her bicycle in circles and crashing into the patio furniture and G arguing with The French Bureaucracy (du jour). When G has a party (in her words, a "cocktail"), I'm usually there, drinking all of the cocktails, so I get to hear everything directly, if a bit slurrily. I haven't minded these sounds very much. It's only once in a while that I fantasize about locking Miss M in the closet.
Across the courtyard from G is Toilet Guy, who we renamed Socket Man, since he is (still) obsessed with G's empty (poor girl) socket. In contrast to the rest of the building's inhabitants, he is so silent that we often wonder if he's dead. But he becomes incredibly, redundantly talkative when you run into him in the hallway and have to have a conversation about electricity with him. This is the only thing he can talk about, along with The Coming Storm and how it could electrocute us all, if we're not careful. We avoid him, and The Coming Storm, like the plague.
Then there are The Moroccan Girls, whom I used to refer to as The Muslim Girls until G told me that was rude. "Would you be happy if they called you The Catholic Girl?" Well, yes, because I'm a Recovering Catholic Girl and accuracy, in the area of religion, is important to me. Anyway, they consist of one Mama and three lovely daughters renting the closet of an apartment that I had rented when I first got here. We've become friends and food borrowers. By renting my old apartment, they also inherited The Masticating Toilet. I can still hear that damn toilet up here on the third floor every time it masticates.
Across the hall from The Moroccan Girls is The Ululating Slapper. He sings and chants and slaps himself at 6:00 every morning. Luckily, I don't hear that anymore.
That's because King Kong drowns him out. This is the building's maintenance woman and all I can say is that she enters the scene at 6ish every morning and throws open the courtyard door, throws open the trash room door, roars when she views our collective filthiness, angrily drags all four trash cans out, then bangs them, one at a time, through the courtyard door, along the corridor and then out the front door. Then she returns to the building and takes a mop and slams it into everybody's door as she pretends to clean the stairs. After 7ish, she retrieves the now-empty bins and bangs them through the front door, bumps and scrapes them against the hallway walls, throws open the courtyard door, upends the trash cans and sprays them down with the hose, throws open the trash room door, smashes the trash bins inside, slams the door closed, then raises her fists to the sky and curses at us all before she thankfully leaves. I don't know how she manages to do all this with Fay Ray struggling, like a tiny Barbie doll, in her hands.
On the first floor is a petite tonsured man whom G calls My Future Husband. He's a private chef, evidently. And very nice. But not my future husband. No. Not at all. Just erase that thought from your mind. I never used to hear a thing from him, but lately he's decided to learn Italian. Perhaps he's decided to join the priesthood, with his monk-like hairdo and all. So, I get to learn Italian with him (Uno, due...), depending on how loud the masticating toilet is.
Next door to him and just below me is The Hot Tan Girl. She really is beautiful. One of G's guy friends, who was visiting from Los Angeles, would do pushups in the courtyard in the morning, hoping that Hot Tan Girl would notice him. His wife, sipping coffee inside G's apartment, would roll her eyes and yell, "Good luck with that, Chunky." In the past year or so, Hot Tan Girl has had a few parties, with music and loud fun-having. But it's been pretty rare. She does have the habit, before she goes to sleep at night and right when she wakes up, of slamming her metal window covers open and closed. This sounds like an explosion, until you get used to it. Which I have not. But, then, a few weeks ago, she got a boyfriend. I am delighted for her. She's really nice and sweet and deserves to be loved. But does she really deserve to have four orgasms, four times a day? Does she deserve a boyfriend who doesn't have his orgasm until she has been reduced to a wet noodle? Yes, she does. We all do. I just wish I wasn't reminded of it every single day. Perhaps this is The Coming Storm which Socket Man has been warning us about for so long. Anyway, I pay attention to the frequency (and not the content) of their emanations, knowing from experience that the ohhing and ahhing will eventually slow down and  "Why the fuck did you forget to buy toilet paper?" will eventually take their place.
Across the hall from The Coming Storm is an apartment that is provided as a temporary haven for women escaping domestic violence. A few times, that violence followed them here, in the form of two robberies. Unluckily, I didn't hear anything, though I was here both times. The robbers even rummaged around in G's outdoor toolbox and then took the maintenance ladder off the wall of the courtyard and plopped it against the building and climbed up to the apartment's window and broke the window lock with G's screw driver and climbed in and then climbed out, leaving a trail of the current resident's underwear as they descended. How in the hell did I miss that? I didn't even know how to use earplugs then, let alone own a pair.
Next is my floor. I used to have a guy on the other side of my wall (our beds are separated by a 4-inch-thick, uninsulated sheet-rock wall. Isn't that cozy?) who came home from work every night and turned on The Simpsons (Les Simpson!). I enjoyed hearing the song. Then his iPhone would ring and I would jump up, looking for my iPhone. Then I remembered that I only have three friends in Paris and they never call me. So I'd sit back down and listen to his conversation (I had no choice). I could have learned all sorts of things about him, if I spoke better French. But alas, he remained a mystery. I never heard anything else from him, though. No moaning or anything. (Thank God.) Then, a few weeks ago, he moved out. And a nice young girl moved in who keeps her TV on all night, listens to Hip Hop all day and when she goes away for the weekend, she forgets to turn her alarm off and it starts BEEP BEEP BEEPing at 6AM and doesn't stop for, well, hours. On the weekends when she stays home, I think she invites her friends from out of town to stay with her. They are party animals. The music is on full blast, so they have to shout at each other to be heard. They have a lot to say, so they keep on shouting until 5 or 6AM. Ear plugs are insufficient, so I now open iTunes on my laptop, set it to permanent calm-but-boring music shuffle, at full blast to drown out the Hip Hop, insert my ear plugs and somehow go to sleep. I have been tempted, when I get up the next morning and they're all snoring, to play 80's Madonna music at full blast. But that's passive aggressive behavior and... downloading her music was too expensive.
Last month, the Hot German Guy across the hall from me moved out and the Hot Tall Dark-Haired Guy moved in. I only know this because he came over with his landlord to ask if I had any moisture. At least that's what I thought they said. I answered, "Well, not as much as I used to. I'm over 50, you know." But then, through sign language, I figured out that they wanted to see the brown water stains on my ceiling because they have the same stains and need to know if it's coming from the apartment above us. I showed them my stains but they didn't show me theirs. I didn't hear much from him after that, until his tall pretty girlfriend knocked on my door and asked for a tire-bouchon, which I thought might mean toilet plunger but when she demonstrated its use, I figured out she wanted a corkscrew. After I gave her the wine plunger, they had a wild party. I could hear it through my ear plugs. I thought someone was being murdered. I jumped out of bed, ready to run out there and save the day in my Super Girl socks, but when I pressed my good eye against the peep hole, I saw many happy people laughing and drinking in the hallway, all wearing fashionable leather jackets. I'm glad I looked before I ran out there. I would have been sorely under dressed wearing only my Super Girl socks.
Up above me? Other than the water seepage, there is a nice husband and wife with a little two-year-old boy. He runs back and forth, back and forth, like an elephant on the wooden floor until precisely 9PM, at which point, I imagine, he is drugged and laid to rest. I am happy that my upstairs neighbors' parenting skills include sticking to the bed time rule. Now, if they would just fix their leaking shower.
So, between cat meows, child bikes, bureaucratic argueings, crashing mops and trash cans, masticating toilets, Oh OH! OHHHHHHHHing, Ah AH! AHHHHHHHHing, Italian lessons, Hip Hop, TV, child elephants, alarm clocks, robberies, dripping ceiling sounds and leather parties, I now know that everybody has a life, except me.
Earplugs have saved me from the onslaught of other people's lives. But as an added benefit, I now know what my body sounds like from the inside out. Earplugs block the outside noise but reveal the gurgling, hissing sounds of my corpus. There's a constant hum to it. Maybe it's the blood running through my veins. Sometimes I forget I have a body, so it's good to know that it's still there, miraculously functioning on its own.
Moral of the story? There really is no such thing as silence. Even in a people-less forest, you can hear squirrels cracking nuts, mooses mating, streams gurgling and from time to time, that annoying one hand clapping. If I moved to the forest, the night owls would be pissing me off to no end. I should probably just get out of my apartment more often. Or, start learning how to play the drums.