on the receiving end

There is something inescapable about sharing a building with people you don't know, and quite frankly, wouldn't care to know in the world. The lyrics of Paul Simon's "One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Floor" are readily applicable to all us renters/condo owners/subletters out there. My objective goal since the maddening encounters of college dormitory life has been to find a top floor place to crash. Additional flights of stairs and sordid flaws of any place on top have never thwarted me from the much-cherished peace. Squirrelly next door neighbor? No problem. New baby across the hall? I'll babysit. Temperature in the bathroom below freezing all winter? I'll shower in my long-johns. Please do not ask me to live on the bottom.

The charms of ordinary life include the necessity of sleep and the occasional removal from the world to sort an issue out. Once upon a time, when I was just a kid in school, I got over the fact that the sorority sisters in the upstair's apartment wore stacked heels perpetually, and that their tri-weekly evening soirees kept the local grocer's beer case empty. My bed was in a walk-in closet, and all I had to do was close the door. An extreme case of the Asian maffia downstairs followed a couple of years later, in another city, but not everyone lives over a drug dealer in a nice neighborhood. He cooked the most pungent foods at the most random hours, and I mean things that would make anyone turn vegetarian.
My place now has more pros than cons, but sometimes I find myself hypothesizing the answers to questions that beforehand would never have held my interest.
(1)Why would a 65 year-old woman wear heels, when it is perfectly acceptable to don frumpy, comfortable bastards (like Saas)?
(2)At what point does one's relationship with daytime programming define a lifestyle?
(3)And what, when the government has made it plain that doing so is a form of slow suffocation, would possess a person to line the inside of their storm windows with plastic? It's like Y2K and random germ warfare might hit this small town yet!

The most humorous part of these questions is not the issue(s) itself, but the fact that the upstairs neighbors we have all dealt with have no idea how much they piss us off!
If that old bird/pizza-diet guy/flock of single girls/movie house bachelor was alerted that we, their neighbors to the south/on the receiving end/unwilling audience have functioning ears, fully capable of hearing that which we do not wish to (yes, I can hear mine go pee, and I don't have to be anywhere near the bathroom) ...
would they change the way that they act? Think about it.