Tale as Old as Time

After spending a decent portion of my time the past month becoming fluent in Mandarin, campaigning for public office, climbing Kilimanjaro, brushing up on my polo skills, and giving birth to septuplets as a surrogate... or at least having dreams about all of those things, I'm back to blogging baby.

And naturally, I have a situation on my hands (not "The Situation," gross, but my situation too is short, loud, and could be from Jersey for all I know).

It's my new neighbor. She sings. A lot.

Not like "oh sweet, I love this [insert Mariah, Celine, Shania] song! So I'm going to use my amateur voice and butcher it to oblivion!" She really gets into it, like vibrato and all.

The only thing I can really think to compare it to is if Jewel were living in the room next to you and you heard her muffled voice for a solid two hours. And not the cool crunchy-granola 1990's Jewel who lived out of her car and sang about her dirty hands and depression and foolish games that are tearing me apart, but rather the midriff baring, Britney Spears wannabe Jewel with the severe identity crisis in pleather pants and chains whose songs become themes for razor commercials. Neighbor Jewel also reminds me of one of my sister's friends from 1st grade who I always used to want to punch in the nostril when she would sing Disney jams that I loved. Everybody sounds good singing Tale as Old as Time you snob.

Girl's got a set of lungs too. Her record was two hours and twenty minutes Saturday morning. I bet if she set her mind to it she could have put those lungs to good use running the Chicago Marathon AND simultaneously sung the entire race.

Now you may be thinking, Hoff why don't you take it easy on this poor girl? Maybe she's only happy when she sings or maybe she has an audition for American Idol coming up or maybe her roommate can only fall asleep to the sound of her melodic voice or maybe she's like Cinderella and there are actually cartoon birds and mice chirping alongside her while she sweeps and you're just being insensitive. That could be true. But I'm farely confident that it's not.

The thing that really prevents any chance of sympathy I may feel for this budding artist is that as soon as she starts to serenade the neighborhood, her pip-squeak of a chihuahua decides to chime in for a little duet.

That dog just brings back all those awful emotions I used to feel hearing the Disney song murderer. All I'm saying is that you should probably watch for me on the nightly news... "This evening in Lakeview, woman arrested for punching a 12 pound chihuahua in its twitchy nostril."