My Orange Little Friends

I mean earplugs, Gentle Reader.  I am starting to carry them with me.  Everywhere.  Ever since that nasty session in the coffee shop where one spoiled little princess was yapping very loudly on her phone for over an hour just two weeks ago, completely dominating the place with her little mediocrities and leaving me with a colossal sense of angst and unease that I almost took to bed with me that night.  I make sure there is a set in my pocket.  Today I needed them.  It wasn`t a princess on her phone this time but two very loud rather twee looking individuals (I would swear they were both raised in the Westside and that she anyway probably attended a posh boarding school for privileged girls).  I simply wanted to enjoy my time in the coffee shop with my sketchbook then her friend came in and it was game over.  I glared pointedly in her direction as she squealed in upper class schoolgirl delight, rather like a pedigreed sow faking an orgasm, with her friend and then carefully inserted the earplugs while still holding the stare.  Ah the schadenfreud as she struggled to veil her discomfort!

By the way, Gentle Reader, here`s a nasty little joke for you:  Do you know the difference between Westside girls and Eastside girls?  Eastside girls have fake jewels and real orgasms.

Hmm... It's almost as if I never wrote a single word about kindness in my previous posts.  Oh...I'm just having a bad day, I suppose...

It did go much better afterward.  I could still hear them but the decibel level was tolerable and I had fun working on a new bird drawing: a Blue Crowned Motmot native to Costa Rica where I will be visiting in March.  Here`s a sweet little google image of this lovely bird (gag! I`m starting to sound like the loud mouthed upper class princess)








Now this is not a screed against upper class princesses or other objectionable twits.  They cannot really help what they are just as I have my baggage to live with, and they might even be lovely people despite their, er, breeding.

But the world has become a very noisy place in recent years.  Noisier than ever.  We have more traffic than ever, more machines.  In coffee shops for example.  Can you remember the last time you could actually enjoy a quiet cuppa in your local café?  Without the racket of baristas operating industrial strength blenders to make their absurd little cold coffee beverages that waste more plastic containers than can fill a landfill in one year.  Without the cacaphony of a half dozen patrons yapping on their precious little phones at a time.  Or with having space available only at those absurd communal tables where strangers refuse to interact and if you happen to be alone are at the mercy of the loud voices of teenagers fresh out of school for the day?  And what about sirens?  They are louder and more strident than ever and almost everyone has to plug their ears when an ambulance, fire truck or police cruiser are screaming past. 

In my own backyard there are the obnoxious six am garbage trucks and the delivery trucks carrying hooch to sell for the liquor store next door.  Those guys are always slamming and banging while doing their job.  Deafeningly.  Sometimes, even with my window shut I still have to put in earplugs and turn up the radio.  I'll say nothing of the noisy idiots next door, upstairs, downstairs across the hall and the ingrained habit I have had to acquire of inserting my orange little friends into my ears every night so I can get a decent night's sleep.

How did it get this bad?