I don't care what the woman three places behind me thinks of her husband's cousin's dog. But no matter how desperately I try to immerse myself in the tabloid covers, my brain (conspiring with my usually lackluster sense of hearing) struggles to sift this woman's speech out of the ambient noise to present to me. If I am trying to work with words myself (especially written), speech interference will drive me not just to distraction, but sometimes irritation or anger. Many people I know listen to music while they write or do homework, but this boggles my mind. Any kind of lyric will drive my own word right out of my head, the same if one were to try and compose an original piece of music while listening to something else. If I am reading and someone nearby strikes up a conversation even in a discreet volume, I must move or abandon my book. If I continue to try to absorb the information/story, it will only make me irritable. (There seems to be a loophole in this: If they are speaking in a foreign language, it can be ignored/tolerated. This may be connected to the "foreign toddlers are adorable, American toddlers are annoying" phenomenon I have also experienced.) I just find it immensely difficult to maintain two different streams of language in my mind. Most do, as when you find yourself typing something someone is saying, but I seem to have taken it to the point of mutual exclusivity.
It's odd. I'm a perfectly competent multi-tasker--I wait tables now (moving on up!) and have little trouble accommodating the dozen little things that need to be done at once. But I can't form my own words with the words of others in my head. Perhaps that explains my awkward conversational skills. Maybe I embrace language too wholeheartedly, and it will be my downfall. All of this was circling around to a point, I believe, but I seem to have lost it. Language displacing thoughts again, I suppose.
Bah, I'm tired of my own words; I'll entertain Clive Barker's for a while.
