It's so very quiet

[logovo]

In my experience the number one thing that I hear people say after crossing the border from Tijuana into San Diego, "It's so clean!", to which I answer, "Money will do that!".

Number two, especially when they come to visit me: "It's so quiet!".

Living in Tijuana meant there was a lot of background noise most of the time, so that you kind of develop this filter, and unless it's really loud or almost standing next to you, you might not notice. When I first moved over to San Diego, after marrying native San Diegan Mr. L, I was surprised at how much a dog barking in the house next door bothered him. It has taken a long time but now I've become almost as sensitive to noise as he has, at least here at home. When I go and visit my mom and dad I can turn on the filter again, so that all the honking, dog barking and rooster crowing sort of becomes white noise.

My cousin is visiting L.A. with her whole family, and I think the quietness of it all, combined with the lack of pedestrians, is kind of freaking them out.

Comments

[fayance]

Ha, that's like my youngest daughter; she got used to living away from home, first in college campus apartments which weren't all that quiet but still were quieter than our house, then she moved to another apartment a few months ago when she graduated college, and the new place is gated and has walking trails and so on and is VERY quiet; in fact, she frets that they're almost TOO quiet, cause if her 60 lb Lab mix gets even a bit playful and stomps his feet on the floor or tries to run in the apartment, her downstairs neighbor calls and complains on her for the noise. But she came home to visit last weekend, and the racket in our household here just about drove her insane. She was used to it of course when she used to live here, but now that she has her own place and lives alone, our house is like a zoo to her. We have a dog, four cats, three tvs which my autistic daughter compulsively turns them all on at once and likes to put them on LOUD cause she's partially deaf; also she tends to have tantrums and shrieks and screams for many minutes at a time sometimes; it's always noisy here, and my youngest daughter was complaining, "OMG, it's like 24/7 severe ADHD around here! I am losing my MIND!" Sorry, ha; I'm so used to it, when it IS halfway quiet sometimes late at night, it wakes me up because the quiet is so LOUD, if that makes sense. I HAVE become increasingly ADD over the past few years, maybe that's why; all the constant, distracting RACKET here all the time is making me increasingly nuts, I guess.

[logovo]

There is a saying in Mexico, something like "You get used to everything, except not eating", which really does apply to the noise levels we can get used to. I don't know how harmful or beneficial silence and noise may be, but yeah, going from one environment to another is jarring.

For me living in where people are so quiet that they can hear and be hyper aware of what their neighbors might be doing kind of bothers me. I'm now privy to the intimate details of my neighbor's feud with his ex-wife, as he goes out to his backyard every night and goes on long winded tirades that everyone around can hear.

[rodo]

That reminds me of that one day in Japanese at uni. The university was a constant construction site with the old buildings being torn down at the time, so it was always noisy. So noisy in fact, that we couldn't open the windows and understand what the teacher said.

Than one day, in the middle of the lesson, something was weird. Really weird. We all noticed it, but nobody could place it, until after half a minute of the entire class plus teacher looking around curiously, someone said: "They've stopped working outside."

And that was it, but we couldn't concentrate at all until the noise was back.

[logovo]

DW ate my comment! Waaah!

Well, I was saying how I was picturing your class, all brains searching, searching for a REASON, and that sense of things not being right.

Sometimes when we travel to places where constantly honking your horn for safety reasons is the thing to do, then come back home, it takes me a while to get used to it.