In a desperate bid to conquer my writer’s block, I have been sifting back through my voluminous folder full of blog posts that never made it past the draft stage for reasons I am not entirely sure of. Maybe I thought some were too contentious/controversial (spoiler alert: they probably weren’t). Maybe I realised they were really crap (probably). Maybe my attention span can be goldfish like (yep yep yep – what was I saying?). I don’t know. But I thought I’d start slowly posting some of them, so they can finally see the light. For better or for worse haha.
This one is from April, 2013. I had just been gifted my laptop for my birthday and the Little Mister was almost 18 months old. Some people on the next street over were having a ridiculous party as they tend to do at peak holiday times (the last one resulted in our neighbours – the good ones – chasing a dickhead out of our backyard while we were away so now I feel completely vindicated for being an old grumpy lady).
As I type this, I’m lying in bed with my beloved Birthday MacBook and listening to the mind numbing dirge of some neighbour’s loud music. I’m thinking old, grumpy lady thoughts and lamenting at the lack of respect people have these days. This is compounded by the fact that I had to listen to someone’s ridiculously loud radio all day too. You know when you can’t actually distinguish what the music is, but the bass is thunking around and you hear the low rumble, like the whisper of bogans starting their V8s all at once? It starts out OK. It’s not too loud and you’re kind of distracted anyway, but then it gets into your ears and your brain and slowly tortures you until you can’t think straight and you’d kill for the peace of the night. You know that you chose a place to live where when it’s all serene, you can even hear the ocean, despite being a couple of kilometres away.
Then I wonder, WHEN THE F*CK DID I GET SO OLD? You go through phases in life (or at least I did).
1. You’re too young to go to raucous parties with loud music, but you dream of the day you’ll be cool enough.
2. You’re at those parties and you don’t care about anyone else. If the cops show up it’s an extra awesome story to tell everyone who wasn’t there.
3. You stop going to those types of parties, but you feel happy when you hear them because you feel the nostalgia and are happy that someone is still enjoying their (assumed) youth.
4. You have a kid who has to sleep well at night to even half function through the day. These parties turn you into an uptight, old, crabby b*tch.
Guess which stage I’m at?
Also, early on in this post I used the word dirge. My mum uses that word. That’s a mum word. An annoyed at all the loud people mum word.
I’m a little disappointed at how ‘old’ I have become. I wonder if I’m just being precious sometimes. Surely people are allowed to party a bit loudly on a Friday or Saturday night? You know, like until 11pm or midnight or something before they turn it down out of respect?
Not everyone has a toddler or is at home doing sh*t all, I tell myself. Perhaps I’m just being an obnoxious parent who wants the world to revolve around them all of a sudden.
But then I think, NO. It’s just respect. Most of the parties I attended when I was younger were in semi rural places where the neighbours lived further away and/or were given advance notice of what was to come.
I can now hear various neighbours out the front talking. I tried to eavesdrop (like a crotchety busy body old lady) earlier and it seemed that they weren’t stoked with the noise either. I want to call the police and whinge, but I’ll be honest. I’m procrastinating. Everyone I know who’s ever made a noise complaint and wanted to remain anonymous to the party host has always been revealed by a not so smart police officer (don’t get me wrong I have the utmost respect for the police). I don’t want to be that old, grumpy lady who called the police at 8:30pm, thank you very much!
I think I need a ‘complaining about the noise’ outfit. I think a faded pink, fleecy dressing gown with a floral theme would be appropriate. Curlers for my hair. Fluffy slippers. A rolling pin I can shake around. Glasses hanging off my nose. I could just march right on up that street and give those hooligans what for!
