Sleep

Sleep is very important to me. I consider it so vital to my well-being that few things infuriate me more than feeling that sleep is being "stolen" from me by someone who is being selfish or who is not considering the other people sharing their world.

Sunday night, my neighbors were out of town. They have several dogs. I guess they don't have a doggie-door. So they put the dogs outside. The dogs are, understandably enough, not happy - it is hot, it is sticky, they are outside, their "pack" is partly missing.

So the dogs barked and howled most of the night. (Maybe all of the night; I don't know. About 1 am I got up and went over to the guest room on the other side of the house - threw all the books stacked on the bed onto the floor, found a battery for and reset the little alarm clock I keep in there, and grabbed maybe a couple hours of not-very-good sleep.)

Also, my neighbors have a security light. I've talked to them about this. They know it shines in my bedroom when it turns on. They've tried repositioning it to no avail. (For some reason, they can't be persuaded that, even though we live in a v. small town, even though they have a lightly-sleeping neighbor who WOULD call the cops at any mysterious noise over there, even though the police patrol regularly, they don't need said light). The light is one of those motion-triggered ones.

So: unhappy dogs + motion-activated light = light is on all night long.

In addition to those two things - which, really, I think should be more than any person should have to bear who is trying to sleep - we have entered our "summer weather pattern" here. Meaning: hot (high 90s daytime, maybe dips to 75 at night), humid (it was especially bad Sunday night), and high pressure (which just makes me hurt). So I was miserable on top of everything because sometimes, even with air conditioning, you cannot make a room totally pleasant when it's that miserable outside.

And my tooth - the one I had worked on last week- was hurting. (I'm supposed to go in and get it checked out again today. I'm praying that it's not going to require a root canal - though it does hurt a lot less this morning; maybe it was something related to the weather).

So all of those things combined into a giant swirl of misery. I get irrational when I'm tired, when I feel like I SHOULD be sleeping but can't sleep. So I stomped around my (dark, but not dark enough) room cursing my neighbor, their dogs, the person who invented security lights. I wondered if I bought a bb gun the next day and shot out the light, if they'd be able to trace it to me. (Probably, I decided grimly).

I thought mournfully how the next day was the first day of classes and how nothing was worse than trying to teach when I was sleep-deprived. I felt that sort of existential despair you feel at midnight when you want to sleep, when you know you have to be up in less than 6 hours, but you can't sleep. You start to get the feeling of "it will ever be so" and you wonder how long it takes a person to die from lack of sleep.

As I said, I finally decamped to my guest bedroom - I didn't do that earlier because (a) I held out a vain hope that my neighbors would come home and take their slavering Hell-beasts indoors and (b) there was a lot of crap - books, my academic robe, posters, etc. stacked up on the guest room bed and I'd have to take time - and "rev" myself up, energy-wise - to remove them. And I'd have to find an alternate alarm clock (What I use in my room is a big CD player with an alarm function; too heavy to move, especially in the middle of the night). So I finally did all that - set the alarm clock for the time I needed to get up.

And then, I admit, I did something not very nice. "I need a backup" I thought "In case the little alarm clock isn't working right." And I looked at my CD player - it's set to turn on and play the CD I have in there when the alarm goes off. So I turned the volume all the way up. I figured, "I'll hear it from the guest room if the little alarm clock fails." And, coincidentally, my neighbors would probably hear it in THEIR bedrooms.

But I also have to admit - there was, at that point, a "dose of their own medicine" thing about it - as in, "If they don't care that their dogs are barking at midnight and keeping those of us who must rise early awake, let's see how they feel about a dose of loud Shostakovich at 5 am."

(I did, however, wake up before the alarm went off - and went in and turned it off. Though I still feel perhaps I might have been justified in letting it happen).

****
So to try to solve at least one of the problems (and not have to move semipermanently into my guest room - which is small and not entirely satisfactory as a regular bedroom - I decided to see what I could purchase in the order of "room darkening" shades.

Now, I wanted to do it quickly and easily - not have to schedule someone to come out to my house and install them, not have to screw with all kinds of new hardware myself.

So I went to Lowe's (there's one in town, now. My choice would have been them or wal-mart - as far as I can tell, we don't have any "just window coverings" type store). Waited about 10 minutes for someone to help me. Found a blind that I knew would work with the existing hardware, but figured it was no better than what I had. Looked at the Levolor blinds. Talked with the guy - would these work with the hardware I have? Oh, yes, he assured me, it's the same. And these are more room-darkening!

So I bought four blinds for my bedroom.

Came home. Problem #1 - one of the blinds had clearly been returned. I hope it was just that it was supernumerary or that it didn't fit the intended window.

Problem #2 - they DIDN'T fit the existing hardware! (Well, that's what you get, accepting the advice of someone who's not an expert, I guess). They almost fit. They would stay - temporarily - in place, until I had the energy to put up the "right" hardware.

But then there was Problem #3 - these were sold as "room darkening" shades, right? They didn't darken the room any more - and in fact, did less - than what I already had up. So I took down the blind I was struggling with and put the old one back up.

And decided I lacked the energy to return them right then. I really didn't want to truck back out to Lowe's, and wait in a giant line again (apparently they are trying some kind of cost-saving program where they only have one person working the customer-service desk - and they are also running the only register open - at this time). I didn't want to be told, "But you took one out of the box! You cannot return a blind you took out of the box." To which my reply would be, in a barely-controlled, Linda-Blair-in-Exorcist voice, "But how are you supposed to know how crappy the supposed 'room darkening' feature is unless you TAKE ONE OUT OF THE BOX?"

So I don't know. They are now sitting in the middle of my dining room floor, a pile of FAIL. I don't know whether to go and get the $64 back or whether to install them in my family room instead - they will fit, I have the right number, and I sort of need new blinds in the family room. But I can't make up my mind on that right now; I just simply lack the energy to deal with it.

****
I do have to say last night was better - the people were home and I guess they realize that their dogs make a lot of noise (though you'd think they'd realize the dogs would make the noise when they were NOT home, as well). About 10 pm I heard the woman go out and talk to the dogs (yes, that is how close our houses are) and take them indoors. And I guess she turned the security light off at that time because I didn't notice it going on during the night.

So I slept through the night. But still...few things make me more irrationally angry than someone being loud late at night, or someone with a light that shines in other people's bedrooms, or something like that. That's why I think high-density housing - as much as the Greens like it, because it is more energy-efficient - will never work 100%. Because there are far, far too many people in this world who think, "I should be able to play Top Gun on my XBox with the volume turned up to "11" all night long, and anyone who's bothered by that is just a big poopyhead and they will have to suck it up." Or there's the person who thinks that 6 am is just a PEACHY time to run their super-sucker vacuum cleaner that rattles the windows of everyone around them.

If everyone had the same schedule, the same expectation of "Noise goes off at 10 pm and doesn't come back on until 8 am," then it might work. Or if your typical high-density housing was built with Fortress-of-Solitude grade walls.

But seeing as I can live in a house - a SEPARATE house, a house I own - and I can be disturbed by stuff going on in the yard 10 feet from my bedroom window, I don't see all of us living in hive-blocks, and being able to be 100% happy and 100% tolerant of it any time soon.

I know lots of people live in apartment high-rises and love it. Maybe I've just had bad experiences (tending to live in housing in a university town...). But I've said before - and will say again: unless I absolutely cannot afford anything else, I will not live in an apartment again. Not unless I have a good guarantee of the soundproof quality of the walls, ceiling, and floor. (Because sometimes I'd like to be that person running the super-sucker vacuum cleaner at 6 am. I wouldn't - not unless I knew I wasn't disturbing my neighbors - but sometimes I'd like to have the option, you know?)