Thoughts on Noise, Early Acclimation, and That Motherfucking Super Nintendo

[x_los]

The noise makes me want to rip things apart with my teeth. Horrible, repetitive, constant, meaningless sound. Patch’s new antique Super Nintendo is out to get me. The midi music, the percussive little effects, the wee squawking. Why do I sleep in the library, where privacy and silence come to die? Oh yeah. Because I’m poor. From the other room Meg suggests they play a game where they make all the sounds themselves in time with the donkey-thing. Points for vicious use of telepathy?

It’s not that I don’t love my friends, and not that I’m unused to sharing space. I’m the eldest of seven kids, including the siblings and adjacent-dwelling cousins, and have lived with innumerable pets, grandparents, and employees mucking about the house. I can handle a good deal of organic sound, though someone saying ‘Hey Erin’ when I’m working tends to slice through my brain like a hot knife. Probably a remnant of my mother’s constant lowing for me to come up to the main floor and do something or other.

But we never habitually had the television on. My roommates seem to feel much more comfortable with its droning ambient noise than without it. I’m not trying to be an anti-tv snob, but the low whine of its static when no one’s watching it creeps the fuck out of me. I never go to the tv unless I specifically intend to watch a film/show on dvd. I’ve arrived at the end of the generations that tune in for programs, I think. I bit-torrent a show or buy it, abetted by the fact that several of the shows I watch aren’t American and don’t get broadcast here ever/in a timely manner anyway.

Also, I never played any video games as a kid (anti-violence was my mother’s singular point of liberal thought). The hyper-real amount of noise generated by every action in those old games makes me want to seize. This must be what living in a flat above Akihabara Electric Town in Tokyo is like.


Except, you know, for the part where it's nothing like that.

Comments

[waddlin-penguin.livejournal.com]

You've got a double post.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I had one roommate in college who liked the TV on all the time. She needed it to study-- she explained to me that she couldn't have music because she sings and/or gets distracted, and she can't have silence because she sings and gets distracted. Nonmelodic words she can ignore are ideal.
I cannot ignore the TV. Multiple times, she stayed up a couple hours after I went to bed, assuming I'd just go to sleep while she watched Sex in (and?) the City DVDs. Or Titanic. Or she declared I had to see Steel Magnolias or Beaches or something that every girl cries at, and I don't have a soul because I didn't cry at Ladder 49. And because my brain does not ignore stories, I'd lie awake listening, completely alert.
The year after that, we didn't have a TV. I still don't. I forget they exist to a great extent.

[anyhennypenny.livejournal.com]

would it kill him to mute it? before you kill him?

[x-los.livejournal.com]

You're got double eyes! OH! BURN! Because you wear glasses!


...Shit. I wear glasses...

[x-los.livejournal.com]

As long as something dies I will be satisfied.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone has to see Beaches. My gay, gay dad did, however... multiple times. Frigging Beaches.

I wonder if being able to tune out on stories is actually somewhat adaptive? Like, if people who can tune out stories can also easily skim reading material for its most valuable information? B/c I so can't do that, I just read all 90some pages, and oh, how fast homeworkings would be if only I could.

I kind of just think of the TV as a big computer monitor that my dvds go into when the Mac is inconveniently small for public viewing...

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I certainly didn't need to see Beaches. It would have been better if I'd been able to mock it, gently or not. It bugged me much more that she declared me soulless because I didn't cry at Ladder 49. It takes a great deal more to affect me; the story has to work or I'm not going to play along.

I'm not sure if it's adaptive, but it's certainly learned. I'm not a noisy person to begin with. I like music and would rate it as being pretty important to me, but rarely listen to it of my own volition-- I have the car set up for long trips, but have never programmed an Iowa City radio station. I forget the TV is there most of the time. I haven't used the CD player Mom insisted I have (she brought it when I got my wisdom teeth out) except as a place to put things, and it's going back home at break. When I listen, I am Listening, and I can't do anything else with words right then.
I would say it's adaptive in the sense that there are multiple brain channels working; I have a friend who can carry on conversations with everyone in earshot because she can hold them that easily. Me, not so much.