Return
Has it really been three and a half days since I last posted? Time flies.
Not sure I have anything interesting to say at the moment. Lots of stuff I want to post when I get a chance—the usual URLs, a review of X2 (that's apparently the movie's official name; I guess they decided to skip the usual approach of having a regular name and then abbreviating it with some goofy nickname), etc. But I should probably go do some editing first.
I do want to note that last night I had my first uninterrupted full night's sleep in two or three weeks. V. pleased, though still a bit groggy. Slept in the living room for a few nights, but that didn't seem to help; switched back to the bedroom night before last. Tomorrow morning will be the real test; we'll see whether loud-car guy's car will wake me up. It's now being parked significantly further away from my window, and he would now have to actually go out of his way to pass my window, so I'm mildly optimistic.
Also, I figure one of the lessons I can learn from this whole loud-car sequence is how to go back to sleep after being woken up. I do seem to be better at it now than I was a few weeks ago.
In accordance with theory that if there's a pattern in the way other people treat you, it may (or may not) have something to do with your own behavior, I started thinking a while back about factors common to both recent situations that involved a stranger yelling angrily at me. (Something that happens very rarely, but that tends to upset me inordinately when it does happen; I think I have an exaggerated idea of how thin the line is between verbal aggression and physical violence.) I realized that in both cases I had done something passive-aggressive (in each case it was an action in which I felt totally justified at the time) in an attempt to avoid confrontation, but that strategy backfired when it ran into someone more prone to active-aggression than I'm used to. I'm certainly not trying to excuse those other people's behavior, and I certainly have plenty of excuses for my behavior in both cases; still, perhaps these experiences will help me think twice next time I have the urge to sneakily do something that will interfere with someone else's activities. . . . Interestingly, in both cases things would've gone much better if I'd gone to someone in authority to deal with it from the start (though to be fair, I'd been trying to do that for two weeks with the noise problem before I took steps of my own); that's usually my first impulse, but I have this notion that it's more adult behavior to talk person-to-person with someone than to run to the authorities whenever you have a problem. But maybe the key word there is "talk," which I didn't actually do.
Anyway. Interesting food for thought, but it's not getting my editing done.