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Sep. 14th, 2003 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gilanaIn the middle of my lovely restful shabbos afternoon, I heard some noise coming from outside. After a moment, the noise resolved itself into words; extremely obscene words, in fact, chanted to a tune, and coming from a few yards over. For the first few songs I tried to ignore it, but closing my windows didn't help any, and it was impossible not to hear the words. By the time they got to singing about anal sex with 5-year-olds, I was feeling actually assaulted. I got up, pulled on clothes--didn't even bother with shoes--and went out. I followed the sound around the block to the house it was coming from. There were two guys washing a car in a driveway nearby. I asked them if they thought I'd be taking my life into my hands if I asked the partiers to keep it down. They looked at their watches and decided that since they had only started recently that they shouldn't be all *that* drunk yet, and agreed with me that the content was a little much, and said to just be polite. (Which surprised me; it had never occurred to me to try any other approach. You can pretty much always get further with people by treating them politely than you can by yelling at them.)
So I took a deep breath and ventured back behind the house to where the noise was coming from. There were a few guys hanging out on the fringe, so I went up to one of them and said, "Hi. I live in the neighborhood, and I was wondering if there was someone I could ask to keep it down a little." The guy looked a little sheepish and said that he would take care of it, and explained that they were the rugby team and had just won a game. I offered my congratulations, and said that in fact it wasn't really so much the noise level as the content, and left. Shaking. Luckily, I hadn't realized how quite nervous I was of confronting a group like that until I had already done it. I was just so angry, feeling like they had no right to force me to listen to crap like that, and decided that instead of lying there angry all day I'd rather do something about it.
They did stop for a while, then it started up again about a half hour later. My roommate called the police that time, although the police were ruder to her than the rugby players had been to me. Sigh. We're thinking of trying to contact the rugby coach to see if he has any influence for the future.
So I took a deep breath and ventured back behind the house to where the noise was coming from. There were a few guys hanging out on the fringe, so I went up to one of them and said, "Hi. I live in the neighborhood, and I was wondering if there was someone I could ask to keep it down a little." The guy looked a little sheepish and said that he would take care of it, and explained that they were the rugby team and had just won a game. I offered my congratulations, and said that in fact it wasn't really so much the noise level as the content, and left. Shaking. Luckily, I hadn't realized how quite nervous I was of confronting a group like that until I had already done it. I was just so angry, feeling like they had no right to force me to listen to crap like that, and decided that instead of lying there angry all day I'd rather do something about it.
They did stop for a while, then it started up again about a half hour later. My roommate called the police that time, although the police were ruder to her than the rugby players had been to me. Sigh. We're thinking of trying to contact the rugby coach to see if he has any influence for the future.
