Apartment Living, NYC

The baby started throwing up at around 5pm, right before I arrived to pick her up from daycare.  The stroller ride home was, fortunately, uneventful, though once we got here, the requested handful of crackers quickly resurfaced.  I could tell this would probably be a long night.  I wasn't prepared for the half of it.

Because she fell and hit her head the night before, and because we weren't sure she didn't have a concussion, though we were pretty sure she had been exposed to another vomitty kid at daycare, we went to the ER for the doctor to tell us what we already knew.  A few hours and a failed CT scan later (I can't imagine how we failed to keep a toddler prone and immobile for 3 minutes), we came back home to "wait and see."  The baby quickly fell asleep.  That's when the bass started thumping from above.  And then from below.

Two-and-a-half hours later, our daughter is the only one sleeping, perhaps in the entire building.  In fact, she might be the only one who routinely goes to bed before 10pm.  Two floors up, the young man - student? - is playing host to probably 75 people standing around pouring juice into cups half filled with some clear alcohol.  I know, because I went upstairs to ask them to turn down the bass. (It hasn't happened.)  Downstairs, our other neighbors have started smoking a bong on their balcony directly below our window.  Fortunately it's winter, so our windows are tightly closed, though that hasn't blocked the sound of their exuberant and persistent and emphatic declarations, now keeping me from falling asleep.

And - amazingly! blessedly! - the baby, so far, has slept through it all.  Her father and I are not so lucky.  He went into the bathroom to come up with his own proof for the Pythagorean Theorem.  I decided to bitch on my blog.

I can't help but thinking how unoriginal this behavior is, and I don't even have the luxury of thinking back fondly to when my roommates and I threw parties like this in college.  We were infinitely more likely to be listening to Louis Prima or Simon & Garfunkel, playing charades, than toking with Shakira blaring from the stereo (regardless of the fact that Shakira didn't release her first cross-over album until I was in graduate school, and I wasn't cool enough to have any of her previous albums).  In daylight, these neighbors are mild-mannered, often smiling at the baby, maybe even a little shy.  What is it about being in college that inspires this madness?  What is the attraction in bleary-eyed, slurry-worded people you don't even know drinking in the apartment your parents are paying for?  Part of me wants to find out how to contact these parents to clue them into their children's behavior.  The other part of me dreads the day when I become the parent to a college-aged child who might be pissing off neighbors like me.

For the time being, I am consoled by the thought that only four months remain until we return to Vermont, where we don't share walls or ceilings or floors with other dwellings, and our neighbors are almost uniformly over 30 years old, friendly, and quiet.