Neighbors

Living in a city in which there are so many different ethnicities -particularly living in a neighborhood which has a major concentration of a couple of similar seeming ethnicities- is a real challenge to one's appreciation and understanding of different cultures.

Case and point:
I am working very hard right now, at nearly 2:30 in the morning, to be really specific when I say, "I hate these people" to mean my neighbors in the green house to the left of our apartment building and my other neighbors in the white house to the back of our apartment building and not the ethnic makeup of my neighborhood as a whole.
And when I say, "I hate this music" I mean it specifically in reference to the music that blares loudly, from hours on end and well into the morning (see above and time stamp of this post) which makes it impossible for me to find quiet in any of the rooms of our apartment. And by "quiet" I mean, possible for me to hear my television that I've turned nearly all of the way up or, say, my thoughts.

It would be easy for me, given my ethnic outsider status (as American Black), to make false generalizations about all of the members of my neighborhood based on my limited experience with these specific neighbors because of what appears to be their shared ethnicity (Caribbean).
This is something that I am conscious of and work on diligently. The country, city and neighborhood that I live in requires this kind of work. This is not a bad thing. I honestly think that a little bit more personal frankness about these sorts of thoughts and experiences (and a commitment to work on them) will make a better country, city and neighborhood.

Given all of this, I do think it's fair to say that my neighbors do not help me to like reggae. Or reggaeton.

Grrr.

The weekends are hard for me as far as getting along with my neighbors in the house behind us.

The weekends make me hate them.

At least once a month there's some a loud party that starts in the early evening and lasts until about two ay em. I believe that I've ranted about the noise from these parties before.

And then there are the Saturday (and Sunday) mornings, like today, where someone from the house gets up early and begins to do loud outdoor tasks.
Like hammering on the pigeon coop that's right below our bedroom windows. Or using an electric saw to cut tin for the roof of that coop. This morning's favourite seems to be the use of the car alarm to tell time. Everywhere 5 to 10 minutes the car alarm would go off making it impossible to stay or return to sleep.
This has been going on since 7 ay em. There's nothing like waking up with a headache brought on by your inconsiderate neighbors.

Spiderman lives in our building!

So there was some drama in the our apartment building.

Yesterday someone posted a note on the glass door to the foyer and by the mailboxes admonishing a fellow neighbor for their loud music at 7AM. That did not go over well.
By the time I’d returned home yesterday evening someone had written a response. “Get a life.”

This morning, the sign on the glass down had been taken down. Someone had left a longer response on the sign on the mailbox asserting that it was their cultural right to listen to music at levels that some consider loud at 7AM and threatening even louder music over the Labor Day weekend.

Bighead and I talked about the drama while at work. She, being a lot more even about this than I am, maintained that posting two snippy signs in the building about our fellow neighbor rather than talking to our neighbor is passive aggressive. I maintain that passive-aggression and culture do not excuse inconsiderate behavior. Threatening your neighbors with loud music specifically to offend them in the the name of a cultural-right is just as un-neighborly as passive-aggressively trying to shame your neighbor into turning their music down.

Frankly though, we were both concerned about the escalating anger in the notes and the surfacing negative feelings about gentrification.

Personally, I think that rude is rude regardless of how you feel about what gentrification is doing to your building/neighborhood. I think that an inability or unwillingness to take into consideration the fact that you have neighbors (in fact to breach the tacit but unspoken rules of apartment living) is poor home-training to say the least. It’s irresponsible and just plain lazy to use, “This is our culture” as justification for that bad behavior. It’s bad enough that our neighbors on the street behind us routinely have parties featuring music blasted so loud that there is no place in the building to go to escape it. It was really frustrating to have to think about someone planning such aural assault when I’m trying to have a nice relaxing long weekend. I think that it’s also important to note that there are 14 units in this building. Our broker has personally turned over 8 of these units over the past 6 months. Whether our neighbor likes it or not the majority of this building has been gentrified and the majority has become the minority.

It makes me a bit nervous because I don’t really want to have to deal with the kind of hostility that can surround gentrification. It’s one thing to have it on the street. It’s another thing to have it in my building. I think that on the street I’m a little bit incognito because I’m brown (which makes me worry sometimes for Bighead) but in my building they know that I’m new.

Luckily our building’s got its very own super-hero. Sometime today a level head posted a note pointing out that 1. Talking to your neighbors is the easiest way to resolve a situations and 2. That different people need different things in the morning.

I don’t know who this masked man is, but I love him.

Summer Street Scene

On Hawthorne Street, between Flatbush and Bedford, all of the girls sit outside of a house on the South side of the street and call across the street to the boys where they (laze luxuriately as the slender black boys of Summer generally do) call to them from an apartment building on the North side of the street between laughter and the sound of skateboard wheels on asphalt.

I do not believe that I was ever young like this and I doubt that they believe that they will ever be old like me.