I’m writing again from Shakespeare Café with an author friend, Yu Wang. She’s a Chinese expat living in Paris, and she’s written a memoir on that topic. Tomorrow, she leaves to tour Eastern Europe for the summer. This might be the last time I come here this summer.
Soon after we arrived, there was almost a brawl outside. Just outside on the patio where more customers are eating and drinking, a cigarette smoker was allowing smoke to blow in somebody’s face. They shouted at each other for fifteen minutes before the finally left.
Next, an annoying girl just sat near us. She is a human short circuit. She is twitching, bouncing her knee, and sniffling non-stop. Despite the similarity to opioid withdrawal symptoms, she has an air of self-satisfaction that junkies in withdrawal usually don’t have. Now, she is shouting commands across the café to her boyfriend or husband who stands in line. He is getting the coffee, and she wants to make sure he gets her order exactly right. Her voice is nasal and makes my skin crawl. I don’t think she needs any caffeine. I pity her boyfriend.
I wrote for a while, or at least, I tried. It’s the girl’s blood-curdling voice that is preventing me from working. She has a non-regional American accent and speaks in a loud, high-pitched drone. She is speaking slowly, and the way she pauses between random words makes it impossible for me to tune her out. I cannot hear myself think.
For informal speech, the word “like” has several established usages. It is grammatically appropriate, for example, when used as a comparative preposition, a verb, a subordinating conjunction (even if it is not always correct usage), and an adverb. When the speaker is conscious about how she says it, she can even say “like” as a quotative particle: “I was like, ‘dude, check out those Hare Krishnas walking down the street.’” But that only works once per conversation per week. Beyond that, the speaker risks sounding like a moron.
When I was a kid, “like” had already infected my generation’s speech, but a lot of old people would say “you know” every sentence. The “you knows” were annoying too. The “you knows” of my parents’ generation were generally high school dropouts. I couldn’t bear to listen to them.
While old people were still saying “you know,” in the 1980s, Valley Girls from San Bernardino, California had made obnoxiously excessive and inappropriate usage of the word “like” popular. Most kids were saying it often and inappropriately. They were generally saying it in place of the “you knows” of our parents’ generation, except it was worse. “Like” had become a filler to replace “um/uh” and pauses. Saying “um” is forgivable if done sparingly. Sometimes, you just can’t think of what to say, and saying “uh” is an honest way to acknowledge ones lack of fluency without being pushy. Now, “like,” on the other hand, is often used in an authoritarian way to keep people from interrupting while the speaker tries to think of the appropriate word while monopolizing the conversation.
When I was in highschool, the vast majority of kids who said “like” were native English speakers who could not string enough words together to form a smooth sentence. I don’t know if it’s mental laziness or lack of intelligence on the children’s part, but we did happen to be confined together in a poorly funded American public school.
Even as a teenager, it was torture to hear my classmates saying “like” all the time. It generally was not possible to avoid those children because my high school was the kind of closed campus that was modeled after a prison or perhaps a factory or a work house. We did not have the basic freedom to move around and escape bad surroundings and unpleasant people.
Thus, here I sit at Shakespeare café, and an American woman, who looks like she is nearly thirty, is saying the word “like” once every four or five words. In the past five minutes, she has even said “like like,” that’s double “likes,” several times. I don’t know how someone can graduate from college and still talk like that. I don’t know why her parents let her enter adulthood without first teaching her not to talk like that.
She is sitting with her boyfriend, and she barely lets him get in a word. He just sits there and whispers something in reply while she speaks non-stop for minutes at a time. He is quiet. I wish she could be more like him.
I try hard to tune out people like her. They don’t come here every day, but since college is on summer break, there have been more American tourists here.
She prattled for another fifteen minutes before leaving.
Finally, I could concentrate. I wrote for a while. I was going fast. I had written nearly a page. Suddenly, another barrage of grating “likes” assaulted my ears from across the room.
Liker 1 (20 something male voice) : “I was like … watching them both like …. this year, and like, Rick and Monty,.... is like totally …. more intelligent.“
The ellipses represent long, irregular pauses.
Liker 2 (20 something male voice): “Like yeah ….. like I watch them too.... But like Bojack Horsemen like is like … deeper, like you know?“
Liker 3 (20 something FEmale voice): “Like my brother ….. he is like totally into those shows, ….. but like I don’t really like watch them, but like um …… he watches them like all the time.”
I don’t know what Bojack Horseman or Rick and Morty are, and considering who their fans are, I don’t want to know. I don’t watch TV anyway.
I suffer from partial hearing loss. The fact that I could hear every single word each liker said while I was sitting on the other side of a crowded room should give an indication of how loud these people (American) are compared to everyone else (French). I was counting the likes and counting the total number of words each “liker” emitted.
Liker 1: “Like yeah, … like Bojack Horsemen, I like like (double like) Bojack Horseman. …. Bojack Horseman is like good like but like um it’s not like deep. It like pretends to be deep….. But, like, Rick and Morty is, like, more, um, like, intelligent.”
Liker 3: “Rick And Morty is like scientific.”
Liker 2: “Like, I agree totally. I like can’t um like um wait for the next like season. of Bojack. It’s going to be like totally awesome.”
Liker 3: “Like, have you ….. like ever noticed… like how often we say the word “like?”
LIker 4: “LIke yeah… um true dat… um I’m trying to stop saying “like” so often, but it’s like hard.”
Liker 1: “Me too. One of my teachers in high school ….. used to ….. li.. correct us and tell us to …. stop ….um .... whenever we like …. said it.”
(Liker #1 almost finished a sentence without saying “like.” Maybe there is hope for him.)
Liker 2: “Like I don’t even notice it … like …that much.”
I’d kill myself if I had to go back to high school and listen to that for another four years. The repetition of that one word combined with the irregular cadences and random pauses in their speech was excruciating. The longer they speak and the more they repeat “like,” the more raw my nerves become. To make it worse, their loud voices make it impossible not to hear them.
The effect is similar to that of nuisance barking. Nuisance barking is when a nearby neighbor keeps a dog that barks nonstop for hours each day. Selfish neighbors with small dogs are the worst culprits. Of course, it’s the fault of the neighbor for being a bad owner, but the dog often takes the blame. Nuisance dogs are frequently the targets of poisoning, gunshot, fatal bludgeoning, or theft. The owners of nuisance dogs are subject to fines and lawsuits. It is not uncommon to read about them in the “crime reports” sections of the paper after their dog’s nuisance barking causes somebody to crack and assault them for being obnoxious dog owners and bad people in general.
There’s not much that can make me snap, but loud, annoying babble comes close. The reader might have figured out that the likers were Americans. It’s summer break, and I can either avoid Shakespeare Café until the Americans go back home to school, or I can acquire a set of noise cancelling headphones for people like them. Short of that, there is no way to tune it out. I’ve tried relaxation exercises, meditation, deep breathing, yoga, and ear plugs.
Compared to other nationalities, Americans are difficult to be around for extended periods of time. I’m an American and lived most of my life there, so I know this first hand. My experiences with such people when I lived in the USA helped drive me to alcohol and hard drugs. I cannot mentally tune them out, and dependng on my situation, I cannot always physically leave them. Their behaviour takes a hard psychological toll on me, and drugs and alcohol made it easier to tolerate them and not snap and murder them.
I believe that people such as the likers are making life unbearable for so many others to the point that it is fueling the rise in opioid addiction in the US. Such people helped cause me to become reclusive there and eventually contributed to my moving to the desert where I lived alone and off the grid. It also helped drive me to leaving the country all together.
__
Back to the ski trip.
It was noon on Saturday, and I was still serving in Purgatory at the megamarket grocery store situated in a suburb of Paris I had been writing about during the previous five blog entries. I was there with a friend shopping for food we would bring with us on a two week ski trip. I don’t like supermarkets, and I hate shopping during the weekend rush, but being here wasn’t my choice. Drusilla had been leading me around the store, and I was pushing the cart, trying to keep up in the heavy crowd. I felt like a retard on a trip to the zoo.
I've reached the word count limit. I will continue later.
Soon after we arrived, there was almost a brawl outside. Just outside on the patio where more customers are eating and drinking, a cigarette smoker was allowing smoke to blow in somebody’s face. They shouted at each other for fifteen minutes before the finally left.
Next, an annoying girl just sat near us. She is a human short circuit. She is twitching, bouncing her knee, and sniffling non-stop. Despite the similarity to opioid withdrawal symptoms, she has an air of self-satisfaction that junkies in withdrawal usually don’t have. Now, she is shouting commands across the café to her boyfriend or husband who stands in line. He is getting the coffee, and she wants to make sure he gets her order exactly right. Her voice is nasal and makes my skin crawl. I don’t think she needs any caffeine. I pity her boyfriend.
I wrote for a while, or at least, I tried. It’s the girl’s blood-curdling voice that is preventing me from working. She has a non-regional American accent and speaks in a loud, high-pitched drone. She is speaking slowly, and the way she pauses between random words makes it impossible for me to tune her out. I cannot hear myself think.
For informal speech, the word “like” has several established usages. It is grammatically appropriate, for example, when used as a comparative preposition, a verb, a subordinating conjunction (even if it is not always correct usage), and an adverb. When the speaker is conscious about how she says it, she can even say “like” as a quotative particle: “I was like, ‘dude, check out those Hare Krishnas walking down the street.’” But that only works once per conversation per week. Beyond that, the speaker risks sounding like a moron.
When I was a kid, “like” had already infected my generation’s speech, but a lot of old people would say “you know” every sentence. The “you knows” were annoying too. The “you knows” of my parents’ generation were generally high school dropouts. I couldn’t bear to listen to them.
While old people were still saying “you know,” in the 1980s, Valley Girls from San Bernardino, California had made obnoxiously excessive and inappropriate usage of the word “like” popular. Most kids were saying it often and inappropriately. They were generally saying it in place of the “you knows” of our parents’ generation, except it was worse. “Like” had become a filler to replace “um/uh” and pauses. Saying “um” is forgivable if done sparingly. Sometimes, you just can’t think of what to say, and saying “uh” is an honest way to acknowledge ones lack of fluency without being pushy. Now, “like,” on the other hand, is often used in an authoritarian way to keep people from interrupting while the speaker tries to think of the appropriate word while monopolizing the conversation.
When I was in highschool, the vast majority of kids who said “like” were native English speakers who could not string enough words together to form a smooth sentence. I don’t know if it’s mental laziness or lack of intelligence on the children’s part, but we did happen to be confined together in a poorly funded American public school.
Even as a teenager, it was torture to hear my classmates saying “like” all the time. It generally was not possible to avoid those children because my high school was the kind of closed campus that was modeled after a prison or perhaps a factory or a work house. We did not have the basic freedom to move around and escape bad surroundings and unpleasant people.
Thus, here I sit at Shakespeare café, and an American woman, who looks like she is nearly thirty, is saying the word “like” once every four or five words. In the past five minutes, she has even said “like like,” that’s double “likes,” several times. I don’t know how someone can graduate from college and still talk like that. I don’t know why her parents let her enter adulthood without first teaching her not to talk like that.
She is sitting with her boyfriend, and she barely lets him get in a word. He just sits there and whispers something in reply while she speaks non-stop for minutes at a time. He is quiet. I wish she could be more like him.
I try hard to tune out people like her. They don’t come here every day, but since college is on summer break, there have been more American tourists here.
She prattled for another fifteen minutes before leaving.
Finally, I could concentrate. I wrote for a while. I was going fast. I had written nearly a page. Suddenly, another barrage of grating “likes” assaulted my ears from across the room.
Liker 1 (20 something male voice) : “I was like … watching them both like …. this year, and like, Rick and Monty,.... is like totally …. more intelligent.“
The ellipses represent long, irregular pauses.
Liker 2 (20 something male voice): “Like yeah ….. like I watch them too.... But like Bojack Horsemen like is like … deeper, like you know?“
Liker 3 (20 something FEmale voice): “Like my brother ….. he is like totally into those shows, ….. but like I don’t really like watch them, but like um …… he watches them like all the time.”
I don’t know what Bojack Horseman or Rick and Morty are, and considering who their fans are, I don’t want to know. I don’t watch TV anyway.
I suffer from partial hearing loss. The fact that I could hear every single word each liker said while I was sitting on the other side of a crowded room should give an indication of how loud these people (American) are compared to everyone else (French). I was counting the likes and counting the total number of words each “liker” emitted.
Liker 1: “Like yeah, … like Bojack Horsemen, I like like (double like) Bojack Horseman. …. Bojack Horseman is like good like but like um it’s not like deep. It like pretends to be deep….. But, like, Rick and Morty is, like, more, um, like, intelligent.”
Liker 3: “Rick And Morty is like scientific.”
Liker 2: “Like, I agree totally. I like can’t um like um wait for the next like season. of Bojack. It’s going to be like totally awesome.”
Liker 3: “Like, have you ….. like ever noticed… like how often we say the word “like?”
LIker 4: “LIke yeah… um true dat… um I’m trying to stop saying “like” so often, but it’s like hard.”
Liker 1: “Me too. One of my teachers in high school ….. used to ….. li.. correct us and tell us to …. stop ….um .... whenever we like …. said it.”
(Liker #1 almost finished a sentence without saying “like.” Maybe there is hope for him.)
Liker 2: “Like I don’t even notice it … like …that much.”
I’d kill myself if I had to go back to high school and listen to that for another four years. The repetition of that one word combined with the irregular cadences and random pauses in their speech was excruciating. The longer they speak and the more they repeat “like,” the more raw my nerves become. To make it worse, their loud voices make it impossible not to hear them.
The effect is similar to that of nuisance barking. Nuisance barking is when a nearby neighbor keeps a dog that barks nonstop for hours each day. Selfish neighbors with small dogs are the worst culprits. Of course, it’s the fault of the neighbor for being a bad owner, but the dog often takes the blame. Nuisance dogs are frequently the targets of poisoning, gunshot, fatal bludgeoning, or theft. The owners of nuisance dogs are subject to fines and lawsuits. It is not uncommon to read about them in the “crime reports” sections of the paper after their dog’s nuisance barking causes somebody to crack and assault them for being obnoxious dog owners and bad people in general.
There’s not much that can make me snap, but loud, annoying babble comes close. The reader might have figured out that the likers were Americans. It’s summer break, and I can either avoid Shakespeare Café until the Americans go back home to school, or I can acquire a set of noise cancelling headphones for people like them. Short of that, there is no way to tune it out. I’ve tried relaxation exercises, meditation, deep breathing, yoga, and ear plugs.
Compared to other nationalities, Americans are difficult to be around for extended periods of time. I’m an American and lived most of my life there, so I know this first hand. My experiences with such people when I lived in the USA helped drive me to alcohol and hard drugs. I cannot mentally tune them out, and dependng on my situation, I cannot always physically leave them. Their behaviour takes a hard psychological toll on me, and drugs and alcohol made it easier to tolerate them and not snap and murder them.
I believe that people such as the likers are making life unbearable for so many others to the point that it is fueling the rise in opioid addiction in the US. Such people helped cause me to become reclusive there and eventually contributed to my moving to the desert where I lived alone and off the grid. It also helped drive me to leaving the country all together.
__
Back to the ski trip.
It was noon on Saturday, and I was still serving in Purgatory at the megamarket grocery store situated in a suburb of Paris I had been writing about during the previous five blog entries. I was there with a friend shopping for food we would bring with us on a two week ski trip. I don’t like supermarkets, and I hate shopping during the weekend rush, but being here wasn’t my choice. Drusilla had been leading me around the store, and I was pushing the cart, trying to keep up in the heavy crowd. I felt like a retard on a trip to the zoo.
I've reached the word count limit. I will continue later.