Who's the Noisy Neighbor?

Over the weekend, Principe and I received a letter from our neighbor saying that our TV volume is too loud. She wrote us a letter because she claims that she had been knocking on our door but nobody ever answers. Everytime she knocks on our door, the volume would go down for a while, but then it will goes up to the original volume. I can't help but laugh. Since Principe does not speak English, he never opens the door when people come knocking. He usually just mute the TV and see if there will be further action, if nobody is hollering and yelling outside he wouldn't be answering the door at all.

The letter goes on about how I'm making people in the 4 apartments around me very uncomfortable. Our building is old and the walls are paper thin, and most people goes to bed before midnight and not everybody wakes up at 8 o'clock in the morning and if we don't quiet down, she'll have to call the building management. I know that it's a "she", because she signed her name "Jennifer" on the bottom without telling us which apartment she's from... coward.

Well, while I do agree with most of her points, I refuse to live my life based on other people feelings. Don't get me wrong, I don't turn on my TV all the way up just to retaliate or intentionally make my neighbors uncomfortable, but I will not make myself uncomfortbale to fit other people's lifestyle. As my former colleague had says about me: "He's generally very accomodating, but god help the ones that f#(k with his TV!"

I'm not the loud one in my neighborhood, not by far. The one who lives upstairs from me usually likes to bounce his basketball, watch movies and play video games until 4 am. He used to throw parties all the time until early morning and I tolerated it. We all paid cheap rents to live in this old building, the walls are thin and water damaged, there are tons of roaches, flies and mice, the elevator and mailboxes are usually broken. My bathroom door is broken for months, the faucets leak. The heat is usually too high. So yes, the building is in bad condition and badly managed. But the rent is cheap.

My apartment is basically a 10 step by 10 step box, that's why I need my TV to be on at all times so my mind can be somewhere else instead of feeling claustrophobic. So I turn up my TV volume to "8 out of 25" and I get a complaint letter. Hey, you get what you paid for. If we all get rich, we might be able to live in buildings with thicker walls, but until then we all would have to compromise. "You live in the city, deal with it". And by the way, good luck on calling the building management, and when you get them, tell them to fix my bathroom door.

Well, I said that but lately it has been bugging me, and I tried not to turn the volume over "5 of 25"... Freaking annoying.