January 09, 2007
For the past couple of months they have been doing construction on my dorm building.
Our room is on the second floor, at the corner. The construction is taking place on the room on the first floor, at the corner.
The construction begins at 8:30 AM and is usually very loud, the sort of loud where it sounds like someone is in your room doing their best impression of the apocalypse. I am almost always out 'till very late working or at a rehearsal, and then I stay up even later watching DVDs or reading, because c'mon. On a normal, construction-free day I wake up around one, refreshed and ready to conquer what's left of the day.
It has often felt, on mornings where the jackhammers and power drills jar me from sleep, like someone is attempting to drive me mad. Not crazy, MAD. Bug-eyed Victorian insanity. It feels like an Edgar Allen Poe story. It feels like a much less graceful Amadeus where, instead of trying to drive the protagonist to his death by getting him to compose a requiem for his father, someone is trying to drive him to his death by getting him to grumpily sit in his underwear checking his e-mail and fucking around on the Internet with headphones on all morning, debating whether or not he should leave the house when any second the workers could go on break and he could hop back into bed for an hour and a half before going to class.
I thought it would help if I mentally named the construction workers whose work I was hearing. "Good morning, LaVon! How are the kids?" I could think upon waking. "Drill's hummin' like a dream, Lem, did you just oil it or what?" This did not work. I ended up mentally threatening to use Lem's drill to ritually slaughter LaVon's kids if construction did not cease, pronto. I wrote invective-filled letters to everyone I could think of. I staged protests. I sabotaged their tools. I did all of these things in my head while twisting in my sheets and cursing at the daylight on the ceiling, so it had all had very little cumulative effect.
I complained to anyone who would listen. Oh, the complaining! If I had focused the energy I spent complaining into just leaving the house and doing something productive with that usually-unused first part of every day, the latter part of my year would've been an exhausted creative frenzy rather than an exhausted depressing one. But I am stubborn and my compulsion to put a Netflix disc in the mail every day far exceeds my compulsion to get things done. And also, I was goat-shit test-pattern CRAZY from sleep dep.
The purpose of the construction is to build a wheelchair ramp. The building is very very new and already has a wheelchair ramp, but apparently it was built at a slightly incorrect angle.
Today, they jackhammered out the old wheelchair ramp. On my way out of the house this morning, I saw the men who very well could be Lem and LaVon loading it piece by piece into a wheelbarrow. The new one is already in place. The end is in sight. I damn near beamed with sweet relief on my way to sleep at the library.
Posted by DC at January 9, 2007 06:31 PM