2001-08-02 - 12:20 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Rock the Casbah", The Clash

Last night I was out for a walk around the lake and heard that weird noise again. The honking sound. I grabbed the nearest unsuspecting couple and said, "What's that noise?!"

"Frogs," was the answer.

"But it's so LOUD!" I said. "I can't hear very well but I can hear that noise plain as day."

"Well, they could be big frogs," the woman said, holding her hands out in a size approximating a small canteloupe.

Big frogs! Noisy frogs! I started wandering around trying to figure out where they were, and was even more excited to discover that I was hearing more than one frog, in different pitches! I'd hear a deep, low sound, three times, then another frog farther away would answer in a higher pitch. Then they'd start honking almost at the same time, low-high, low-high, low-high.

Goddamn. When I got home I told Poindexter he had to come out with me tonight and hear them and help me find them.

I keep forgetting to mention "the drug dealer".

That's our nickname for a guy across the street. I don't like him. Not because I have anything against selling drugs, per se, but because of his behavior.

He rubbed me the wrong way the first (and only) time I met him. He didn't smile, his gaze was shifty and disinterested, and his attitude made me think of snobs in high school. I think he's younger than me, possibly mid-20s. He's technically good-looking (but not attractive) and deeply tanned. He claims to own a pool cleaning business.

Now, I admittedly know very little about the business of cleaning pools, but I am suspicious that a 25-year-old is making enough money at a primarily seasonal business to afford the kind of house he owns. Neither Poindexter nor I could afford our house on our own, and he's an engineer and I'm a math geek. We speculated that this neighbor either has family money or he's a drug dealer.

The drug dealer theory is our favorite, and is supported by the constant presence of people at his house. He's always having parties. This is all fine. He's got some nice, friendly people attending these parties.

Some of the others, however ... these people are outside playing basketball, running around screaming, playing loud music, and even having BONFIRES on the grass median in the wee hours of the morning. The police have been called in several instances, and a neighbor came around asking us to call the non-emergency police line if we heard them again, but it doesn't really seem to be stopping the problem.

One time the cops came around and talked to him for a good long time, but not long after that the parties got noisy again. It would be okay if they all stayed inside -- these houses are really insulated -- but they always end up outside. Anyone trying to sleep with the windows open on a cool night is in trouble.

This young man really needs to learn to control his guests. I hope I won't need to update this story, but I might.

Man, having our house put back together after this flood has been excellent assertiveness training for me. People come in here, do weird shit with my belongings, and I have to ask them to cut it out.

Not only that, but I have to ask people who don't speak much English to do things, and worry about whether they even understood what I said. And then when they explain things to me, I have to worry about whether I'll understand them. This is excruciating. I generally tend to avoid communicating with people whom I can't understand (whether it's because they have unintelligible accents or -- grrr -- they mumble), but I can't get out of it in this situation.

The wood flooring we got, prior to installation, had to be kept between 68 and 74 degrees so that it would be sufficiently dry for installation. The wood tends to swell in the humid summer. Otherwise, come winter when the wood dries out, our floor would be full of cracks between boards.

Last week, with all that wood sitting in the living room keeping dry, workers came to remove the old wood and left the front door wide open while they were working. All three workers were in the house, so it wasn't because they were taking the old wood out. I asked them to please keep it closed as much as possible, since it had gone up to 78 in the house and was very humid. It was closed for maybe ten minutes. I asked again, but someone was moving wood at the time. I would check occasionally and the door was aways open. Then my husband shows up at the end of the day, and the door is closed before he makes it into the house from the garage.

I don't understand why they couldn't make a big pile of ripped-up wood, then all three of them take it out as quickly as possible and close the door again. They must have some division of labor going on, which means that one guy is taking wood out the door all fucking afternoon. Do I have the right to ask them to change their mode of work?

Sigh.

Today I had to ask the new bunch to please take the TV off the couch and put it back on the TV stand. I don't know why they put it there in the first place. The TV weighs well over 100 pounds and has sharp corners, so it could have stretched or ripped the leather.

Then, they're installing the wood, and it looks from a distance as though they're not getting the boards as tight as they ought to be. I keep thinking I see open cracks between boards. I went down to look, and I'm still not certain -- I'm looking at the boards much more closely than I ever did before the flood happened -- so I decided not to say anything.

Saying these things should be easy, but it's not. It is painful. I so hate confrontation.

The reason it's so difficult is that I'm not 100% certain that I'm correct. The door thing and the TV thing I was fairly confident about, but the cracks in the floors, well, I'm really not certain. Maybe that's as close as they can possibly get the boards together. If it isn't, how do I know this? How do I argue my case when I know nothing about how wood floors are put together and I can't even remember for certain what the old floor looked like?

What I need is to get better at bluffing, I guess. Convincing myself that my concerns are legitimate. I'm not being an asshole about it, I know that. But it's hard to bluff -- or even just discuss a concern! -- when they brush off my concerns in heavily accented English I can't understand.

Sigh.

I remember one time in a store I was 100% convinced I was right about something. I did okay then, although I was nervous as all hell. I was exchanging a set of glasses I had bought on sale, because one of them turned out to be chipped. Rather than just take my set and give me another, she had to return the original and re-charge me. The computer turned up the non-sale price. I told the clerk about it, and she said, "It's not on sale anymore." I was flabbergasted. She was stupid too -- it wasn't just that she didn't know how to make the computer charge me the sale price I had originally paid for the exchange; she honestly thought I was supposed to pay the full price. She went and got her manager before I had to ask, and it all turned out okay.

Ah well. It's a constant struggle. Sometimes I wimp out, or decide that the confrontation is not worth the payoff, but I need to keep working on it so that the emotional distress is not so high, and I am able to confront more often.

This talk of people who have accents or don't enunciate made me think of something.

I don't have trouble understanding people who speak quickly, as long as they enunciate. They wear me out sooner, though, because it requires slightly more concentration to understand them. A normal pace of speaking allows me plenty of time to process all the cues -- lipreading, context, the vowels I can hear -- and allows them to click into place very shortly after the person says stuff. There's probably a 1-2 second lag between what I take in and the moment of full comprehension. When people speak really quickly, though, I start lagging behind and have to juggle more information at a time.

Hee ... the mental image I get of this process is a toddler jogging to keep up with the hurrying parent whose hand he's holding.

Huh... there's one solution to the problem of dealing with day laborers who don't speak much English that I should give some serious thought, for other reasons as well. Most of them (around here anyway) are Latino, so I could learn Spanish. It's similar enough to French and languages are easy enough for me that I don't think it would take too long to grasp the fundamentals. The hard part would be learning to understand it and speak it intelligibly.

I should definitely try it out, though. It shouldn't be too hard to find a local Spanish speaker who will help me with my Spanish in exchange for me helping them with English.

Or maybe I should wait 'til I get to Philadelphia and see if I am having day laborers over all the time, and if so, what language do the majority of them speak.

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