Please put down the joystick and go back to drinking your iced tea.

My apartment complex is a quiet place, for the most part. It's mostly grad students or young professionals like myself, and in general there aren't any loud parties or people shouting to each other in the parking lot. It's actually pretty eerie. I've only met two of the three neighbors on my floor, and even then only briefly, and I have only small notions of what goes on in their lives. The neighbors who live upstairs from me are also generally quiet people. I haven't met them. I only know they are a couple because once or twice I've seen them through the window when I'm coming in, if it's dark out and they have their lights on and shades up. I've heard the occasional TV sound. And I hear them peeing.

Due to some unfortunate acoustical infrastructure in my apartment building, the sound of these people peeing resonates into every room of my apartment. At times I've been convinced that they have 4 toilets: one directly above my bedroom, my living room, my dining room, and my kitchen. But really I know, there's only one, and it's directly above my own bathroom. For understandable reasons, the sound is especially clear when it is the man peeing, but I can hear her, too. And let me tell you, these are people who clearly take hydration very seriously. It seems they are always going! However, I've learned to accept this quirk of apartment-building life and live with it...especially since I don't hear any other noises.

Or at least, I didn't hear any other noises. For about a week I've been hearing loud, machine-like noises through the floor. It started last weekend. Daisy freaked out in the middle of the night and started running in circles on my bed, chasing her tail, then rushing into and out of the bedroom, into the living room and back, at around 3 AM. I woke up groggily and slowly realized there was what sounded like techno music coming through the ceiling. Very strange behavior from my otherwise reticent, liquid-loving neighbors. Then every night this week the repetitive noises filtered through, for a couple of hours every evening, usually ending around midnight. After a couple of nights, it struck me--it sounds like machine-gun fire! From some kind of video game. So my conclusion has been that these are crazy people who waited out in a tent at Best Buy or something to pick up a Playstation 3. I don't know, maybe the whole craze just inspired them to dust off their old Playstation 2, or some old computer game. I don't particularly care what it is; I just hope it stops soon. And if it is a PS3, I have to wonder, why didn't they just auction it off for a million dollars like any other sane person would?