I am sick (a weird, early-summer cold) and it has been hot, triggering a flea outbreak in my room. Ugh. So I spent the day on the island of my bed, drinking water, reading magazines and sweating, trying to avoid walking across the carpet.

A woman in the apartment building next door always wakes me up with her yelling whenever I try to sleep in. She yells at her kids, she yells at her husband. She seems incapable of speaking in a normal voice. I found out from the girl who used to live in my room that one of her sons is autistic and that is how she excuses her yelling -- she can't communicate with him otherwise. Sometimes it makes my stomach hurt.

I always seem to live next to crazy yelling people. In my first apartment, there was a couple who lived on the other side of the fence behind the house, in a pile of junk. Really. There was junk piled waist-high all around the building -- I remember a really great red bike, some crazy board games, an oversized Oscar trophy, tires and tires and tires. They used to fight all the time, usually about how he had disappointed her. She had left Sweden to be with him and their life was a disappointment. He would tell her she should have gone off with that other guy and she would agree. I imagined her as haggard but still beautiful. When I actually saw them she was nothing of the sort -- they both had strange, extremely pear-shaped bodies and their skin hung loose and gray from their enormous frames. She had brown frizzy hair. He was bald. They shuffled slowly through the junk and yelled. One day -- I can't even remember when -- she was gone. And that was the end of the yelling.

At my last place, there was a shady apartment building next door and a terrifying yelling girl lived in the apartment closest to my bedroom window. She used to wake me up past midnight with her angry demands that her mom find "my fuckin' pager." Once I saw her poking her head out the window and knew I would never do anything about her yelling -- her gargantuan, acne-scarred face was too frightening. So I lived through the time I heard her call an eight-year-old girl a "little whore," I ignored her penchant for watching movies at an insanely high volume, I pretended I didn't hear her 2AM screaming phone fights. And lived to tell about it.