Love shack!

This current residence is my first "real" apartment in the sense that the building isn't school owned and it isn't filled with students. In fact, Nate and I are the only students in the building. The difference is usually quite notable: the place is quiet during the work day, the muted sounds of TVs replaces explosively loud AIM pings, and smoke—whether it be from cigarettes, marijuana, or burned popcorn— is entirely absent. The floors don't need to be an indestructible linoleum, and we can save money by conserving energy since electricity isn't included. I like it very much.

Still, it's frequently obvious that the real world isn't all that different from the collegiate one. One of our neighbors is a professor, which definitely gives the building a not-so-far-away-from-campus feel. And I've mentioned our downstairs neighbor Norm, who is in many respects a frat-boy with a job. The fourth apartment (the other one on our floor) is no exception. Jay and Kelly are a young couple (dating, not married), who both seem to have a serious night life. They're often out as late as Nate and I are (although certainly having more fun), and conjugal activities happen within a few minutes of 1:30 am more often than not.

We know this because they don't really do anything quietly. They don't often make a ruckus like Norm, but they're not subtle. They're loud on the stairs, both vocally and in step, they're loud loud in the bedroom, both vocally and rhythmically. My bedroom is on the stairwell, so I get most of the former; Nate's bedroom borders theirs, so he gets most of the latter. Still, they don't seem to confine themselves to the bedroom, so I get a dose of the aural experience with some frequency (not unlike my time in Broadway). I've had some good chuckles with both Nate and Jean-François about some of the particulars, which may or may not find their way into another post down the line. At this point it will suffice to say that it's rather inescapable due to its volume.

This evening we were eating our supper in our main room, which is in the back half of the apartment building, and the moans started to issue through the wall. Nate looked at me incredulously. "In the kitchen?" he asked in a hushed voice. I decided that a gentle deterrent was in order. I raised my voice and rambled randomly: So I said to Withers, 'I say! the slope of the tangent of the circle is clearly less than the hypotenuse of the triangle!' And of course what could Withers do but admit that I had a point? 'Quite right you are!' he said to me. Really he was a right good chap about it and didn't let a little thing like that get him down for even a moment!

This seemed to prove sufficient, since the moaning came to an abrupt stop. Well, if I was pleased with myself then, the satisfaction was certainly not to last. At three this morning, our doorbell buzzed for a solid twenty seconds. Shortly after it stopped, a whole party of people came stomping up the stairs, carrying on loudly. They seemed to spend all of two minutes in Jay and Kelly's apartment before turning around and heading back out (this time the boisterous talk was accompanied by a harmonica). Nate and I both fell back to sleep promptly, but both of us are hoping it was a one-time event and unrelated to my dinner time theatrics since we generally like both of them when we have actual contact with them.