Sunday, June 24, 2012

Neighbors Having Loud Sex

So is there some kind of etiquette for when your neighbors are loudly having sex?  And you're not?  Turn on the lights and let them know you're there?  Clap (like teenagers in the college dormitory)?  Mimic?  Or just keep quiet?

Not long ago a young couple moved in across the hall, let's call them Marisa and Nolan, to protect the horny.  While our doors are on opposite sides of the stairway landing, our bedroom windows face each other, about five or six feet apart.

Neither of us has an air conditioner window unit in the bedroom and both of us normally keep our bedroom windows open for ventilation.  While they've covered their window with a sheet to block the view, mine has a vertical blind the previous tenant left there, but they'd cut off the bottom half for an air conditioner that they took with them.

Marisa and Nolan frequently get home in the evenings at some point after I go to bed (usually in the 9pm time frame, but I have a lot of trouble falling asleep).  They come back and after banging up the stairs and slamming their apartment door (not unusual, almost everyone in the building except me does that) they turn on the light in the bedroom and if I'm not very deep asleep, that usually brings me further up in consciousness...

Then many nights I hear the obvious sounds of clothing being removed, with unbuckling a belt the most prominent specific sound and the light only flickered on quickly, sometimes long enough to light a candle, judging by the flickering (like I said, the previous tenant cut off half the blinds...).  Sometimes Marisa telling Nolan in a sing-song, "I'm waiting for you..."  It might be followed by kissing, might not...

Then within a few minutes Marisa starts yelling pretty loudly, "Oh yes!  Oh yes!  Oh god!  Oh YES!  Fuck Yes!  FUCK YES!"  Once she starts getting louder and faster, especially after the "Oh" turns to "Fuck" I can hear Nolan's grunting beginning and then it goes for a few minutes.

And then they're usually finished within about ten minutes, maybe fifteen...  Marisa sometimes winds down, post-coital, with some quieter, but still ecstatic "shit yes, oh shit yes..." On Friday evenings afterwards they often wish each other a Shabbat Shalom (or translated from Hebrew, "peace on the Sabbath," in English (nice that I have neighbors using the Sephardic pronunciation after spending all my time at work with Ashkenazi Jews who use their pronunciation, making me feel I'm losing a little bit of my heritage)).

They make enough noise that I see people stopping and listening at their door sometimes...  And they got started before I got to bed this past Friday night, while I was still brushing my teeth and getting ready, and I could hear their noise coming from the building hallway without even going into the bedroom...

I don't go out of my way to listen or be a voyeur, but our windows are simply that close together and on work nights I go to bed early and get up early...  I hear them loud and clear just going about my normal routines.

Over Memorial Day weekend there was another couple in the building.  I don't know who they were, possibly both were just hanging out with residents and partying.  The man I'm sure was, a Marine with shore leave for Fleet Week, and the girl I don't think was living here either, based on their loud, drunken conversation under my window.  They were making enough noise I could hear the slap of flesh on flesh as they had sex...  And he was enjoying slapping her by hand and asking "you like that, don't you?" and she'd say "yes".

Then there's another couple on another floor who've recently started making some noise.  It's similar but the woman yells out "Oh Baby!" as they work towards a climax.

It's not all fun and games for Nolan and Marisa, however...  At least one night a few weeks ago they came home around midnight, and Marisa was somewhat drunk.  Nolan said "you're all fucked up" to her and then they went to bed.  Then there was a loud *thump* and Nolan cursing at her that she shoved him out of the bed.  He said he was going to the other room, but Marisa said she would go, and then she did.  After they settled down again I heard Nolan say, to nobody but the dark, "I hate this shit."

The only other place I've stayed with such "thin walls" was the Old Palace Lodge in Dunstable, England where Tieto put me up on a couple of two week business trips.  Both times couples stayed in the room next to me.  One of them put on the TV, but if that was intended to mask the sounds of their lovemaking, it didn't really work, because the TV was all tinny and ineffective compared to the rich, full sound of human voices.

Oh well...  Compared to the noises I used to hear in India while trying to sleep, barking dogs, rickshaws, car horns, car backup alerts, yelling watchmen, jackhammers and so forth, the sounds of a couple making love, in pure ecstasy and happiness is much, much more pleasant.  I find myself smiling with a good feeling instead of cursing and swearing.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Woooo hoooo! Leena got her U.S. Visa!

Woooo hoooo!  Leena got her U.S. visa from the consulate in Mumbai this morning...  She had a bit of a wait with other applications, all wishing each other good luck, then went in for her interview, and while the interviewer was skeptical at first, when she saw several albums of family photos of both of our families together, she agreed to the visa...

It's been a lot of work for both of us, doing paperwork and writing back and forth with the National Visa Center.  She's had to run all over Pune to get various legal papers and certified copies of things.

Leena plans to join me here in New York City in about a month.  She might put it off another week or so if she can get a good price on a Lufthansa ticket on the same flight as her nephew, who's coming to the U.S. for medical school.  If she does that she'll have some company for two of the three airports and one of the two flights (and she hasn't flown since before 9/11 and isn't familiar with all the changes to airport security, so a trusted traveling companion would be good for her).

In the meantime, we both have a lot of stuff to do to prepare...

She has to get our flat in Kalyani Nagar in a state to be vacant for a while.  That means things like getting the electricity turned off, but not the account closed, so no one taps into our lines and steals it.  Lots of stuff along those lines...

I need to get this apartment in Manhattan ready for her to move in...  I need to buy a bed tall enough to slide our suitcases under (the bedroom is too small for a bed and suitcases).  I need to buy some shades for the windows as a previous occupant left their blinds in, but they were cut to allow a window air conditioner, which means there's no privacy inside...

I need to buy a coffee maker that Leena asked for, plus I need to get some microwave safe dishes and bowls that I know she'll use (and probably hasn't considered that I don't have yet).

And I need to clean up the jumble and clutter in the apartment before she sees it...

Lots to get done...

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

The Continuing Voyages of the Space Shuttle Enterprise (by sea!)

The Continuing Voyages of the Space Shuttle Enterprise



I went over to the 49th Street station and caught the N train to Brooklyn, taking it 59th Street in Brooklyn, where I used to often get off to head to my apartment on 54th Street.  I waited there for an R train to go to 95th Street, in the Bay Ridge / Ft. Hamilton neighborhood of Brooklyn.  The R seemed to take a long time to come…  But it did eventually…

From the 95th Street station it was easy to see what direction to walk, as the Verrazano Narrows Bridge is gigantic (it's so tall that the tops of the towers are several inches farther apart than the bottoms due to the curvature of the Earth).  It was around 3pm or 3:15pm or so then, with the space shuttle scheduled to go under the bridge around 5:30pm, so I was quite early…

I worked my way to a park by the river and there was a long pathway right over the rocks that went, I don't know how far…  I realized quickly that I carried the wrong lens.  I expected to be farther away from the river than I was, so I took the big, long one, instead of one that would give a wider image.  That meant I had to walk a ways to get far from the bridge…  

So, I walked down in the direction of Coney Island.  A bit farther away were some benches and I stopped there to write in my diary.  It was bright and sunny, which hurt my head and eyes a bit.  Several times older gentlemen stopped to ask me if I knew if the space shuttle had gone by yet, or what time it was scheduled.

I spent a while standing against the seawall, watching various boats and ships, taking some pictures of some of them.  A few gigantic cruise ships left New York City on their cruises, with crowds of passengers lining the decks.  A few large commercial ships came into port…   I kept examining them through the camera, zoomed in as far as possible to see if any had the space shuttle on them, but none did…

Each one coming in would sort of round the corner by Coney Island, then head my direction, then turn away and go closer to Staten Island for a while and then finally turn my direction again and work up towards the bridge.  I guess that's how the commercial channels are dredged and marked.

There was a fire department boat around that was spraying lots of water all around for a while.  Then it went down closer to Coney Island.  Once it started spraying again there, I also noticed a few helicopters down there.  Then I kept a closer watch, and saw a tug boat coming around Coney Island…

Then finally, the nose of the Enterprise on a barge…  And then it came completely into view…

I took a few hundred photos down there…  Once the space shuttle came in sight it took a long time to come up the river, following some channel or river traffic lane.  It had an escort of at least one police boat and fire department boat, and a few others that were probably just out for fun, or maybe supervisors from the company doing the hauling.

On the freeway behind me lots of drivers were stopping in the middle of traffic to take photos, while other drivers behind them were yelling obscenities at them.  While people on the sidewalk were laughing at them and yelling things like "take a chill pill!"

The Enterprise passed us, then went under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and passed yet another gigantic cruise ship, with lots of passengers on the side snapping photos of the space shuttle.  That's the sort of thing they'll never see from another cruise ship again…

Then it went around a slight bend in the river and was lost from my sight… 

I worked my way slowly back to the subway station to return to Manhattan.  It started drizzle lightly for a few minutes as I was returning, but didn't last long at all.

I got the R train at 95th Street in Brooklyn, and at 59th Street changed to an N express train.  I fell asleep on it somewhere after Atlantic Avenue - Barclays Center and woke up around 14th Street - Union Square.

The full, repetitive album, with captions on all the photos (since Blogger doesn't bring them in) is on my Picasa albums...

To follow up with news that came later, the Enterprise was lightly damaged in transit when it hit some pylons for the Subway system that went over the water in the Queens area.  If it was up to me, the newspaper headline would've been "High flying spacecraft hits underground railroad... ...On a boat!"