Annoyed by noise

Last week my Dad was lying in his hospital bed recovering from open-heart surgery and watching the CBS evening news with the sound turned off. “Katie Couric is bad for my stress,” he eventually groaned and changed the channel to Soul Train. \n“Do you want me to take it off mute?” I asked.\n“No,” he said. “It’s enough just to be able to watch all these happy people who are able to move about so freely without feeling any pain.”\nIt’s true that a lot of the noise in our lives is unnecessary. Usually we could probably get by just fine with everything on “mute.” \nHere’s an example: In a class I’m taking, one of the students is totally “that girl.” Whether you know this particular girl or not, you all know exactly who I’m talking about. She’s the girl in class who raises her hand at every opportunity to say something completely abstract and pretentious. When you see her hand waving eagerly in the air you never know what she’s going to say, just that it’s going to make you want to wad up sheets of notebook paper and throw them at her. And in true “that girl” fashion, this girl uses a lot of unnecessary hand gestures as she speaks. She has three favorite movements that she employs during almost every comment. I have labeled them “weighing scale,” “brick-layer” and “waterfall.” \nAs soon as she opens her mouth and her hands begin flailing about, I like to pretend I am a foreigner who doesn’t speak any English. My challenge here is to determine what I would think she was saying if my only clues were her hand gestures. I have decided that, as a foreigner, the message I would take away nearly every time is “Once it was proven that the bricks were of equal weight, I laid them on the ground where they received continual nourishment from the mighty waterfall.” \nI’m sure this is about as useful as anything I would gain from actually listening to her spoken words, anyway.\nI’m convinced that I could watch Grey’s Anatomy without the sound on and still catch almost every plot detail. When McDreamy approaches Meredith with sad, kind eyes, you know he is once again declaring that he wants to be the man to eventually father her children, live with her on a large plot of land and drive their theoretical kids to soccer camp and pageants. When Meredith then narrows her eyes into slits, she is inevitably stringing together some pitiful combination of words about how she can’t trust him, or herself, or love, because she is still so deeply scarred from being raised by parents who treated her like a farm dog. At the end of the episode you can figure out if they are together or not together because it is the opposite of however the previous week’s episode ended. \nI’d put everybody on mute if I could. Until that option is invented, I will just turn up the volume on my iPod and continue to draw my own conclusions.