I get a lot of crap for the way I tune out the world: I sleep. And sleep and sleep. When I come home from work, I take a nap. On the weekends, either I sleep late, or I take a long nap in the early afternoon, or both. It used to be worse; I’d sleep so much during the day that I couldn’t sleep at night. For various periods I’ve lived on a 25- or 26-hour cycle. People who don’t sleep as much hate it that people like me sleep so much, and complain about it. And complain and complain.
My mother tunes out the world by being dense. When she’s not too busy complaining about how I sleep too much, she spends her spare time forgetting stuff. She has learned that canker sores (internal mouth ulcers) are not the same thing as oral herpes about half a dozen times, and she announces it to me regularly, between announcements that canker sores and herpes are the same thing, and how is your herpes, Boris? If she enjoys learning something, she can get more mileage out of the same fact by learning it over and over again. This gives her an interesting perspective on people she knows; having judged them immediately on their appearance and their profession, she immediately assumes kazillions of things about them, and then is repeatedly shocked by the facts that don’t conform to her prejudices. “Why don’t you spend time with so and so?” Because they treat me and everyone else like dog poo. “Wait a minute, aren’t we talking about that cute rich person?”
A friend of mine tunes out the world the old-fashioned way, by never hearing anything. “Come have dinner with my parents, Boris.” No, dude, I don’t want to go to your parents’ house. They treat me like dog poo. “Why do you think that?” Well your mom cuts me off whenever I say anything, and interrogates me incessantly. Your dad scoffs at everything I say and talks to me like I’m a ten-year-old. “Oh, I hadn’t noticed. But they like you anyway.” Don’t you remember that five-minute story your dad told about how I reminded him so much of the biggest jerk he had ever known? “He never said that.”
The great thing about this guy is, you can kick the crap out of him verbally and he’ll never get mad. He’ll never have any idea that it’s going on. He’s convinced that he gets along pretty well in society. People like him, because he’s smart and kind and generous. But he succeeds in spite of his social behavior.
The great thing is, everybody with one way of tuning stuff out hates all the other ways of tuning out. My selectively-deaf friend drives me nuts, whether he’s closing that cat in the sliding door, or not noticing his wife calling for him, or forgetting entire conversations in which he is present front and center. My mother drives me nuts to as has been mentioned. My mother and my friend drive each other nuts. She thinks that he is a lovable dork, and can’t figure out how he could possibly have gotten to where he is being totally unaware of all of society’s unwritten rules. He thinks she is a philistine and possible senility case.
How do you tune stuff out? More importantly, how do you tune out the crap you get for tuning stuff out in some way that some judgemental son of a bitch like myself doesn’t like?