Suzy Says

Love/hate for Friday, November 1, 2002
Life Soundtrack

You already know that I’m pretty much impossible to please. I love living in a city, but I don’t want it to be too noisy. The country is way too quiet. When I’m up at my brother’s and sister’s, it’s so quiet that it actually presses on your ears, and besides that, you can’t get a cab. So San Francisco is the perfect city for me. It’s really a small town that looks like a city, only much more cosmopolitan. It’s nowhere near as crazy and loud as New York or Rome. It’s just right, and it’s even been easier to get a cab here since the economy tanked (before that, it was one of my few complaints about this beautiful place).

I like my apartment to be an oasis of luxe, calme, et volupt&eacute, to quote Matisse. But when John’s home, the calme part pretty much goes out the window. He seems to need a soundtrack to his every movement, as if he were accompanying his own silent movie. When he sits down, he sighs. He’s always tripping over the cats, or bumping into things or dropping them, which calls for swearing (often creative and amusing) or other miscellaneous noises which are beyond my limited powers of description. He coughs a fair bit, in an extremely uninhibited way, and has a habit of clearing his throat which I truly believe is unconscious.

But the worst. The worst is the snoring (though to be fair, other people can be much louder than he is). If I could change one thing about my beloved husband of almost 12 years, it would be the snoring. I know it should be that he’d quit smoking, but since he does that outside and cleans up immediately afterwards, it doesn’t really affect me on a day-to-day basis, unlike the snoring, which affects me on pretty much a night-to-night basis. (Yes, I realize that this puts me out of the running for the Wife of the Year contest, but I already failed the talent portion anyway.) I am usually able to get him to turn over, which almost always ceases the snoring hostilities, but it still annoys me. I mean, he’s sleeping so much that it’s loud, which in turn is depriving Me of sleep.

And here’s the most enduring mystery about snoring: one’s ears are generally located quite near one’s nose and mouth, whence the snores issue. I mean, the snore is right there next to the snorer’s ears, yet it rarely, if ever, wakes him up. Can anyone explain that one?