Why I wear earplugs at work

I keep a pair of squishy foam earplugs at work. They have some fantastic industrial rating, and when I wear them, I can't even hear my keyboard as I type. Clearly, I'm not working with a jackhammer or a high-powered blender. So why do I wear them, in my pleasant office setting?

Because I work about ten feet away from someone, who, like Nature, abhors a (conversational) vacuum and so fills it all day long with talk.

I try to remind myself that he does a good job, that I'm glad he's here, that he's a pleasant, dedicated worker. If I were shipwrecked alone on a desert island, I'm sure I'd grow to miss his constant chatter. But it might take a few years.

I try to just concentrate on my work, and sometimes that's enough. But sometimes I just can't shut him out.

"Would a brown bear really kill a grizzly bear? Don't they know they're cousins? They shouldn't do that! I don't think I like Nature."

"Did you ever hear of a fan tax? I know this guy who's one of the last clothing manufacturers in the city, and they came to him one day and said, 'you know, we noticed you have a fan up in the back of your shop, and there's a new fan tax.' And a ladder tax, too. Can you imagine that?..."

"Wow. I put (unintelligible) in my shoes and now they're stretched out."

"They're coming to our house today to put in new cable TV. HD TV, something to do with high definition, supposed to be a sharper picture..."

"I got a new phone. The old one was really big, and it didn't get good reception anymore and..."

All this in the space of four minutes before I inserted the earplugs. Sweet Lord in Heaven! Can you not give it a rest?

This is when he's got down time. Otherwise he's answering the phone, routing calls to the appropriate people. Sometimes the appropriate people would be a state government agency, or maybe a mental health hotline. He's got Bob Newhart syndrome. Like the comedian in his early days, he doesn't just answer the phone; he repeats everything the caller says. "You say you've got a terrible problem? You say you're concerned for your life? Your, uh, yes, neighbor lives downstairs and she's... trying to poison you by using dryer sheets in the laundry? And you want us to come out and test your apartment? And arrest your neighbor?"

It just drives me wild sometimes. There's no partition between this gentleman and me, so nothing to diminish the sound. He's fairly quiet when he's by himself, though he does like to go around to people's cubicles and strike up conversation with them if the phones are slow. Once his colleague arrives in late morning, he's got a tidal wave of suppressed chatter that needs to come out.

But I see an end in sight. In a few more weeks, we're to move desks, and I should have enough seniority to choose a desk well out of earshot of the Babbling Brook.

I feel guilty even writing about it, because I know he means no harm. But I can't hear myself think when I have to hear someone else think, too.

Dervish on my mind

One of the pleasant things about working from home sometimes is that I get to listen to music without headphones and without interruption. Right now I'm enjoying Dervish's 1996 album Playing With Fire. It's just so pleasing. It helps me forget the Eurovision fiasco, and bolsters my belief they've got other more interesting things in store.

A couple years back I was listening to the cranial jukebox--that's when you get a song stuck in your head; sometimes pleasant, but more often irritating, especially when it's just the few bars from an old record commercial and you never heard the rest of that song so that's all you've got and it goes around over and over in your head...

Well anyway, a couple years ago, it was a Dervish song stuck in my head (The Banks of the Sweet Viledee, another version of the House Carpenter). This led me to visit their website to see when they might next be around Chicago on tour. Not anytime soon, I found, but they'd be at a festival in Sebastopol, California in late September. For some reason, I checked the website for that festival and the lineup of performers was stupendous! In no time, I'd told my husband that this was how we should celebrate our tenth anniversary, with a trip to this festival. Aussitôt dit, aussitôt fait, and a fine time we had, too. We splashed for VIP tickets and brought the instruments, too (the guitar got lost and found and delivered 75 miles to our hotel). We knew no one in town, but quite a few of the performers. One new discovery was the Welsh poet Les Barker; it's hard to pick a favorite among his many self-published poems, but I can't forget about the lovesick dachsund... Thanks to Cloud for the great hospitality.

One (hundred) for the road?

Yesterday was the first frost. Today is November 3rd, and even though it's almost 8:00 in the morning and quite light, our yard is full of birds. There are countless robins in the box elders lining our back fence, and they're darting around madly like barn swallows. I step out on the deck to marvel, but they take no notice.
A trio of mourning doves is foraging under the great tall spruce outside the kitchen window. Something small and stripey (a nuthatch? do we get those here?) is shouldering them out of the way as they earnestly overturn the dry needles.
Coco is buried there. My cockatiel companion for eleven years, he always liked to find the highest perch in the room, which often meant the tallest guest's shoulder. When he died, we laid him under the blue spruce, some fifty feet tall.
I wonder if everyone's finally getting ready to go someplace warmer for the winter.