Boys

Over the past couple of months, I've been learning a lot about boys. Not the sort of boys who are children, but the sort who are theoretically full grown men with drivers licenses and Bachelor's degrees and who make their own dietary decisions. The ones I've been learning about live next door to me.

I have a very intimate relationship with my neighbors, not because I know them or ever talk to them or would even recognize some of them if they ran over my heel with a grocery cart at Publix. I don't even know how many of them there are, partly because that number seems to be constantly in flux. However, my bedroom window is 20 feet from their back door, and they spend a lot of time between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM smoking cigarettes and arguing right next to my face.

Here are the facts: between 3-6 white guys with intentionally mussed hairdos, $20,000 cars and not even a stick of furniture practice their bass guitars and play beer pong at the house next to mine. They all recently graduated from a fancy private college and moved here because they want their Prog Rock band to get big and make them rock stars with a big bus and some groupies. Hence, they moved to the one city in the southeast so supersaturated with musicians as to render it next to impossible that their Pink Floyd covers will ever be noticed by anyone, ever. But I'm not here to judge.

What I'm here to tell you is that it is a complete myth that girls are more dramatic and unreasonable than boys. Boys are JUST as dramatic and unreasonable, and also stupider.

Exhibit A: Last week there was a situation in which Jake was going out of town and Cody had evidently been assigned to take his shift for him at whatever place they work. Jake was in the driveway at 2 AM getting ready to leave in his Jeep Wrangler, and Cody was in the process of telling him he didn't actually want to take his shift. Jake 's strategy for dealing with this was the 22-year-old-boy equivalent to plugging his ears and shouting "LALALALALALALA-I-CAN'T-HEAR-YOU-LALALA!!!" Finally, after a lot of door slamming and the word "bullshit" being bandied about, Cody stood in the driveway as Jake started the car and announced, "If you leave, you're dead to me."

He actually said that. (Also, if you're interested, Jake left anyway.)

Exhibit B: For a while, my neighbors were wont to practice their Prog Rock at 2 AM. It would start with one of them playing bass really quietly and then less quietly, and then another one of them would come home and start in on the guitar, and that's when I turned on my bedroom light because the guitar is nothing if not the prelude to synthesizer futzing, which is almost certainly a harbinger of the dreaded drum solo.

Once I went over there at 1 AM in my pj's, right after someone started futzing around with the synthesizer. Before I could even knock, a skinny guy with Art Garfunkle hair yanked the door open, stepped out, and pulled it shut behind him. He looked terrified.

"I didn't do it," he said.

Me: Do what?

Him: It wasn't me playing bass.

Me: How did you know I was coming?

Him: I heard your dog (Ruby's collar, I guess.)

Me: You heard my dog?

Him: They weren't playing that loud. I told them to stop, though. I told them you'd come over here.

Me: I don't care who is doing it, I'd just like whoever it is to stop.

Him: Sure. Definitely. Absolutely. I'll tell them.

Me: Do you mind if I tell them myself?

Him: Absolutely, sure. You know it wasn't me, though, right? I'm feeling kind of under the weather....

So I walked into their kitchen and saw all the boys with their hair and amps and vintage guitars, and told them that there was a baby sleeping next door, and to please keep it down and practice earlier, etc. And they all stood there like Urban Outfitters mannequins (except their mouths were open) and then they mumbled some stuff about how they didn't know what time it was, how it was somebody else's idea, etc.

Okay, so I guess I am here to judge:

I didn't know boys were so lame.