Skip to main content

Noise control

Children have a serious design fault.

To a child, it seems quite reasonable to shout even simple requests at the top of their voices. To them, a whisper is unthinkable. Life is carried out cranked up to the highest volume and at top speed.

It exhausts me just to look at them and as for listening, well, it's no wonder that my hearing is no longer as acute as it used to be.

There's a lot of talk about the dangers of youngsters hanging out in nightclubs and dancing too close to the speakers, and the danger this poses to their hearing. But what about parents? Who ever thinks about us?

After the daily torment of demands for juice bellowed straight into my ear, it's a surprise my ears drums haven't perforated and that I still manage to cling on to the small amount of cognitive function remaining. After the 13th tantrum of the day my ears continue to ring long into the night, a fitting accompaniment to the jangling of my nerves. And these are just the high points to endless days filled to the brim with high volume bickering, shouting, cheering, oww-ing, singing and whining. Even happiness is conducted as loudly as possible.

Why, oh why, were children not designed with volume control and preferably, an emergency mute button for moments of impending parental insanity?

Comments

Anonymous said…
I use duck tape myself.
They like it now.
They hope for a career as Dr Who extras.

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

Environment

Being an expat, a favorite topic of conversation is 'where I/you want to go next?' or 'When do you plan to go home?' It's a good question. I'm not sure I want to stay in Dubai for ever, but I'm also not sure about how long I want to be here for or where else I would like to live. For almost the first time ever, I have no fixed plans apart from keeping my eyes and mind open to interesting opportunities. And as to going 'home', I have no idea where that is. Constantly moving around as a child left me with the feeling that 'home' is wherever I am right now, so in effect 'home' could be anywhere. The longest I've ever lived in one fixed place was 18 years in London, on and off, but that doesn't feel like 'home' either - I love going back to see family and friends, and it's a great place to shop, but that's about it. I have a great love for California, which is where my extended family is from (and where most of the