searching for a creative way...

...to ignore my neighborhood. Too many of the people in my immediate vicinity seem to take up more space on the planet than they're entitled to. Although they live two doors down, across the alley and across the street, their raucous voices are heard even through our mostly-closed windows from morning to night.  Their dogs bark. Their car alarms go off. Their bass boosters rattle our windows (which obscures the rap lyrics... that might be a plus.) Their bottles and cans wind up on our lawn.  And although the guys across the avenue are are audibly good neighbors, they now have a TOM EMMERT sign in their yard!  So what's worse, I say to myself, people who don't appear to care about anyone else, or people who care about someone who repels me.  Luckily for them all, when I am at my most incensed, I usually have to get dressed again to go outside in order to fix them with the icy Mom Look. THAT would teach 'em, boy oh boy. (I'd launch one of her powerful sighs at them, but they might not hear it over their own din.)  But who wants to get dressed again?

Moving to a quieter neighborhood doesn't seem to be an option, nor does the kind of noise abatement home improvements granted to those living closer to the airport.  And lately, I've spent so much time at work and so little time at home (awake) that it shouldn't matter.  So I guess that I can decide it won't bother me. I do keep "learning" that the only thing in life we can control is our reaction to what happens to us.


Sigh.

On an unrelated note: last night at the book sale a gentleman from Kenya came in seeking books to send back to a library he's starting there. I let him select several boxes' worth, and was bemused to see some of his selections as the boxes began to gather by the door. Mary Higgins Clark. Tom Clancy.  Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels.  I try without much success to envision what some young Kenyans will be imagining that the U.S. is like.  Scary. (OK... sometimes.)  But the wry and broadly drawn New Jersey of Stephanie Plum, hapless big-haired bounty hunter with comically weird family and friends?  I hope they recognize the humor.

Thanks to international syndication, soon we'll all be imagined as rich and bitchy "real" housewives, self-absorbed, drunken Jersey Shore twits or other "reality" denizens.  Let 'em see the exciting life of a church office manager who yearns to have the time and energy to enjoy these precious perfect autumn days which will all too soon be pushed out of the way by cold and snow and frost on the windshield. (The neighborhood does get quieter then, except for the barking dogs and the bass boosters... the plus side of winter.)


I was going to try to concoct some sort of haiku about Kenyans reading Janet Evanovich, but I think I'll spare us all and just go to bed.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.