the banshee saga

it's funny how things often come a full circle...

it started with a 7-month long saga of incessant noise problems coupled with complaints on my part about a particularly heavy family of elephants living in the room next to me. i've since dubbed the couple the banshee and the vampiress. the guy looks like your typical ah beng, except he hails from hong kong rather than singapore. the girl is as pale as your pressed and starched lab coat, complete with long stingy wispy black hair. all she really needs is that blood red lipstick to complete the look and it'll be halloween all year round next door. i think the girl would literally sizzle and shrivel up if sunlight touched her. anyway, after much angst that culminated into a series of complaints by those of us living directly next to them, above them and one up, one over on top of them two nights in a row, they've stopped gaming with the friggin sound turned loud enough to imitate slow rolling thunder. headphones people, headphones!!

other than reverting back to the original stomping problem, they've shut up. maybe the threat of meeting with the head of college worked.. or not. time seems to work differently over here.. it's as if the air's too thick of muddleheadedness at times ~ too thick for even time to travel through and hence, time seems to sometimes slow down as it tries to fight its way through the tangle of madness. things basically never get done efficiently. people get fired for being too efficient over here, literally. people learn to underachieve and it dulls even the best of us down after being submersed in such an environment after a length of time. (icantwaittoleavethisplace!)

anyway, i found it slightly cheeky of fate to have the banshee and the vampiress see me in my flustered glory, bag on shoulder with bits and pieces hanging out, one strap off my shoulder as i struggled to replace the house phone in the foyer with one hand and grappled with my mail and three shopping bags full of soda and toilet paper in the other. you'll have to excuse me when i tell you that these are really nice people, deep down inside those rolls of callous selfish behavior. i tend to be a horrible judge of human character. i only got 11 out of 20 right when i tried to tell a fake smile from a real one.

as i sauntered through the foyer door, appearing to struggle much more than i really needed to... i grinned inwardly. what irony it is, to hold the door open for the same girl that complained about you for the past 7 months and wrote you into the dorm's blacklist. the same one that hopefully made your life hell with all those phone calls imploring you to "please turn it down just a little?" because you certainly made life hell for her, to make sure that she was fully through the doorway before shutting the door quietly behind her and catching up to your girlfriend. thank goodness for my anonymous status.

sigh of relief's not there for long tho... the banshee's gone, the elephant's back.