My fifth year in college (what? shut up, I was a double major, okay?), I lived in an apartment off campus, because I had scientifically determined that one more day of campus food services would, in fact, kill me. So I moved into this very nice apartment with Boyfriend (the very same Boyfriend) and reclaimed my two cats from my mother (the very same cats) and finished up my college career.
The apartment was pretty, and located conveniently just over the mailboxes for the complex. Also convenient in theory was the fact that the apartment was located just over the complex pool. However, that pool quickly became the bane of my existence.
You see, San Antonio, Texas, is a very very hot city in the summer, with temperatures often over a hundred degrees F. And little children naturally have an immense amount of energy, naturally have no concept of keeping their voices down, and naturally wake up at six am on Saturdays.
I think you begin to see the problem.
I was a college student. My life revolved around sleep and the lack of it. And after a long week of classes, all I wanted to do was peacefully sleep until noon on the weekends, reclaiming a few lost precious hours.
But no. Every weekend, starting BRIGHT and early at seven am when the pool opened, my poor exhausted ears were abused by a horde of shrieking children swarming over the complex pool like some sort of brightly-colored mobile fungus. Except that no fungus to my knowledge has EVER entertained itself by screaming "MARCO!" "POLO!" at the top of its little lungs for three hours at a time.
And I do mean EVERY weekend. The pool never closed. I got a bit of extra sleep in the winter, but 'winter' in San Antonio was six weeks long, when the temperatures got down into the fifties. The pool was swarmed about ten months out of the year.
Now, let me be perfectly honest: I sincerely dislike children. Well, no, I despise them. It's not because of their personalities, although I don't like those either. It's not because of their likes and dislikes. It's because they have no concept of volume or pitch, which means that their piercingly high voices are continually broadcast at extreme volume. After five minutes in the company of the most well-behaved seven-year-old, I have a blinding headache.
After an eight-hour day of listening to thirty seven-year-olds play Marco Polo, I was homicidal.
I entertained fantasies of buying a high-powered assault rifle. Then, standing at the pool gate like an avenging angel, I would scream "MARCO!".
And when any little head popped up and screamed "POLO!", I would shoot it.
Actually, I also entertained fantasies of doing the same thing with a suction-dart gun. I wasn't a homicidal maniac, after all, just an exhausted college student. But, no, I never shot anyone with anything. The fantasies were just that, fantasies to help me cope.
I just hunkered down in bed, put a pillow over my head, and groaned imprecations. And eventually I graduated and moved away.
I've lived as far away from the pool as I can, since.
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What a coincidence. Your reaction to small children is more or less the same as mine. And here I was thinking that I was just a hopeless misanthrope who should stew in guilt over his heartlessness at getting severely annoyed at the ENERGY and VOLUME levels children have... gaaaah.
Posted by Nathan @ 06/14/2001 10:09 PM EST
