Wanted: house.

There are certain mysteries inherent to apartment dwelling that, while titillating, are usually better left unsolved. I have always wondered, for instance, just how much mouse pee is really inside our oven… and yet, I'm simultaneously aware that I don't really want to know the answer, because it would drive me so far over the edge of tolerable grossed-out-ness that I might never cook again.

And similarly, though I had sometimes wondered just how much noise carries out of our apartment and into the homes of our neighbors, the question is one which I knew better than to explore. Because that way lies madness. It's the by-extension stuff in particular that gets to me: the knowledge that if they heard us having noisy sex (for example), then they also undoubtedly heard That Other Thing which is nowhere near as mundane as noisy sex and, though they are too polite to mention it, confirms us as certifiable weirdos.

Basically, ignorance is bliss in matters like this.

Or rather, it was bliss, until this pesky incident last weekend in which Brad was acting like the worst person in the world, leading me to shriek a multisyllabic profanity-laced epithet at him, on an otherwise quiet morning when I knew without a doubt that our neighbors were at home.

I spent the next day in embarrassed limbo, praying that our walls were somehow thick enough to have obscured the sound, but then I saw them near the park the next day.

They gave me a scared look and crossed the street.

Under normal circumstances, I'd just knock on their door and apologize for frightening them. "Hey, sorry," I'd say. "Brad was acting like the worst person in the world, but everything's cool now." The thing is, I can't be sure that that's what scared them -- because not 24 hours before the screaming thing, I was skipping around my apartment in my underwear and singing showtunes, specifically the soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera, at top volume.

Which they also undoubtedly heard.

And so, for the foreseeable future, I find myself at an impasse. Because while I'm happy to knock on my neighbors' door and own up to some screamy premarital discord, there is NO WAY IN HELL that I am owning up to an afternoon at home with Andrew Lloyd Weber.