yay, neighbors.

last night, due to some extenuating circumstances, i had to move some heavy things around late at night. my downstairs neighbors banged on their ceiling and i tried to be quite, but i'm sure it was still annoying. I half expected a note, and if I had remembered I might have written a preemptory apology this morning. (of course, i forgot...) today, i got the following typed letter:

Hello:

We, your neighbors, were yet again awakened by excessive noise from your apartment at aproximately 1:00 in the morning. This happens a few times every week.

It sounds as if you are frequently pushing and moving heavy furniture about in the middle of the night, making it very difficult for all of us to sleep.

We understand that we live in a building of tenants with different schedules, but we'd very much appreciate if you could curtail making loud noises in the evenings, especially during the over-night.

Thank you for your consideration and assistance in resolving this issue immediately.

Your neighbors at [adress-, 4th, 5th, and 6th Floors.

So yeah, i felt bad and wanted to apologize anyway, but this letter got me annoyed instead of contrite. Immature, but true. So i turn to the internet to vent my frustrations, since it seems a better target than the neighbors themselves (if i can even identify them - see second point) and oren is away.
First, the only furniture we regularly/ever move late at night is dining room chairs. so i'm not sure what the "frequently" bit is about. It seems they're not either, since it was only the actual loud noise that prompted them to write a letter rather than any of the alleged previous occurrences. I have the feeling they are sensitive to, but realize they shouldn't complain at, normal noises, but took this opportunity to complain anyway. It just annoyed me because they took a real grievence and made it into stop-being-awake-late-at-night, which is not really ok to ask.
Second, they made it essentially impossible to apologize. "Your neighbors on the 4th, 5th, and 6th floors" (rather than. eg, "4B") are a bit hard to identify. I suspect that my immediate downstairs neighbors wrote it, and _maybe_ spoke to someone else about it, but I have a hard time believing anyone upstairs heard it (or cared, since our upstairs neighbors seem to be awake and about, including moving stuff, closer to 3 am than 1...). That said, I don't _know_ who it was, making it hard to know whom to respond So, the self-aggrandizing just makes it logistically harder for me to deal with this in a neighborly way, and also makes me less inclined to do so since i'm now annoyed instead of apologetic.
ps - oren just called, so i delivered this rant in person, but it's already written, so i'm going, stupidly, to post it anyway...

kitsch

while i can't really find a way to excuse having run across this on youtube, once i did i felt like i should watch to the end to confirm my suspicion that the adult woman's face is always blocked out (it is: by hands, siddur, or flowers). Watching to the end I saw something curious. At around minute 5 we see an invitation to a "Wedding" between "he-hattan: ha-shabbat" and "ha-kallah: am yisrael." Now, there are those* who objected to the personification of shabbat as female in (inter alia) BT Shabbat 119a.** But once it's going to be a wedding, it's pretty clear that shabbos is the woman. So, perhaps the skilled videographer is used to B"Y being the kallah vis a vis God and just assumed we always are (ie, replaced shabbat for God, a questionable though not insane theological proposal). Or, even more perhaps, the same impulse to block out women's faces is related to being squeamish about eroticizing shabbat. Well, at least it's consistent...

* Rambam, hilkhot shabbat 30:2 (", וחכמים הראשונים היו מקבצין תלמידיהן בערב שבת ומתעטפים ואומרים בואו ונצא לקראת שבת המלך.")

** רבי חנינא מיעטף וקאי אפניא דמעלי שבתא, אמר: בואו ונצא לקראת שבת המלכה. רבי ינאי לביש מאניה מעלי שבת, ואמר: בואי כלה בואי כלה.