Sleepless in Sacramento

Moving to Sacramento has been an adjustment on many levels. I'm now URBAN. I've had to learn the ways of the URBAN. One-way streets, for example. There are oodles of those here, and I've learned (the hard way) not to assume a street is two-way before turning.

The largest adjustment, however, has been the noise. Bob and I have the good fortune to live two blocks down from the fire department, across the street from a bag factory, next to a bus line, on a busy street, in the middle of a major construction project. We also live a block from two major senior apartment complexes, where a number of ambulances stop on a regular basis.

All of this would simply be the lullaby of the city if not for our apartment complex. I have learned, since spending a lot of time in different apartments, that I have a bit of sensitivity to "neighbor noise". I seem to hear everything - doors opening and closing, muffled conversations, bathroom and tv-use, the community stolen shopping cart rattling down the hall - and tend to respond like an 90-year old crank ("Confounded idiots, why don't they quiet down! - glaring at the ceiling).

All of this doesn't bother me much during the day. However, cue: bedtime. The moment I get in bed, my supersonic dog-like ears perk up to any noise from anywhere and I lie there, tense, distracted, wakeful, tossing and turning, trying to block out the neighbor noise, the trucks rumbling by, the sirens, the person sneezing three blocks away, flipping around and punching my pillow to get comfortable.

Last night was no exception. 

Here's how it went:
10:00 PM    Settled in bed
10:01 PM    Honed in to my upstairs neighbor. Last night she was hosting some sort of a raucous event.
10:02 PM    Bob is asleep, oblivious to the noise.
10:03 PM    The tossing, turning, pillow-punching, listening, interpreting of the noise, flipping begins.
10:10 PM    Bob wakes up from all the tossing, turning, pillow-punching, flipping. Tries to get back to sleep.
10:11 PM    Trucks, outside noise keep us both up
10:30 PM    Still up. I have a great idea to dull the upstairs noise by running our behemoth of a dishwasher. I turn it on.
10:40 PM    Well into the wash cycle, a plate clings against another plate with regularity, providing a chinese water torture-esque situation. "clink...clink...clink". No one is asleep.
10:45 PM    Neighbor party continues. Pillow-punching and tossing and turning continues. Outside, sirens go off. The fireman rumble away in their truck. Still not asleep. I grumble and complain about the neighbor.

This goes on until well past 11:00 PM. I've tried white noise to block it all out, which does help. I'll turn a fan on and let it run all night. Bob, however, has recently expressed a desire not to freeze to death by having a fan blow cold air on him for 6-8 hours. This leaves me with the dishwasher as my only weapon against my upstairs neighbor, which isn't exactly the sleep machine you want it to be.

I've tried running myself down with exercise so that I'll be so exhausted at the end of the day, I'll fall right to sleep. This has backfired, leaving me with super-sore muscles and a headache that keeps me tossing and turning to find a comfortable spot.

Why does the neighbor noise bother me so much? Because I don't know what they're doing. They could be having crack parties. They could be hosting swinger parties. They could be enaging in all kinds of illicit activities, and I, for one, don't want to be lying underneath it all. Hearing it makes me a part of it, and I feel I have to be on my guard for any such possibility.

I would like to believe that everyone around me is into good, clean fun. I would like to believe that the neighbor above me was playing a rousing game of "apples to apples" or "Taboo" last night, rather than beer pong. In truth, I don't know what they were doing, but it's the possibilities that keep me up at night.

And once I get to sleep, it's short-lived. The dump truck will pick up trash at 5:30 AM, Employees start arriving at the bag factory at 6:00 AM, traffic picks up around then, the construction guys have their jack-hammers ready to go by 7:00 AM, and to top it all off, a stupid crow will sit outside our window on the pine tree and caw until you can't take it anymore.

That said, I haven't slept well since moving to Sacramento.