Not A Blog™

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This is an illustration of what I was talking about back in my post, Music as Language. I’ve noticed that a lot of people do work listening to music, (or at least they have headphones on), or they have a TV on in the background—something that makes noise. This happened a lot more frequently when I was in college, in a classroom setting. A significant number of professors would play music while we worked—which was tolerable so long as the work I was doing was art-based and not language based. Listening to music while drawing? I can deal. Listening to music while trying to write an essay about Hegel’s Dialectic? Impossible. Well, impossible for me, anyway.

One thing I need to point out is that in order for me to actually get to the point where I would ask someone to turn down their music, I would need to be having a very bad day. Usually when this sort of thing happens, I just put up with it. I’m extremely non-confrontational, to the point of being a push-over; I will tolerate a lot of inconvenience. In fact, if you ask me whether or not your music is too loud, I will almost always tell you its fine, even if it is, indeed, too loud. I would need to know you a little bit before I’d tell you to turn it down. Even then, I will say first that it’s okay, and only ten seconds later will I come back with, “well, actually, if you could turn it down a little…” I’m sure this leads to people wondering why I didn’t just tell them to turn it down the first time.

The reason is because the first thing out of my mouth is a reactionary statement that I say to hide the fact that I’m weighing the ramifications of asking someone to turn their music down. In other words, society as a whole has dictated that one who does not answer immediately and confidently to all questions is slow, dim-witted, and possibly hiding something. In order to deflect this criticism from myself, I’ve saved up a cache of stock answers that may or may not be what I actually think about the question posed to me. It’s just to get you off my back and make you go away.

If I actually get to the point where I’m walking up to someone, as in this example, and asking them to turn down the music, that means I’ve really been pushed far. It rarely happens. Unfortunately, when it does happen, I have a tendency to lose sight of social mores, and I’ll just explode in a seemingly unprovoked way, or over something small.

In the case of music and conversations going on, I end up shouting like this because I’m quite literally trying to get my message out over all the chatter. I lose track of the ability to gauge proper conversational levels and niceties, because there’s too much going on inside my head. I only have the ability to handle one stream of language at any one time.

This is also why, if you’re in a loud restaurant or bar with me, it may appear as if I’m only half paying attention, or laughing at inappropriate times. When there is enough background conversation that it melds into a bubbling noise, I can usually tune that out (unless it’s loud), but when there’s music and TVs going on, too, it becomes a lot of work to not only focus on what the person is saying, but to respond properly to this. I like to think I can fake it pretty good, but I can only do that for a few hours.

But when it’s only a few distinct streams of language, what the comic shows is pretty close to what happens; I become effectively useless.

-Pulsar