Best gift – Silence

I completely got away with something this year. I gave my husband something that will actually improve my own sanity and well being.

Dave and I get along, but we have pretty different leisure pursuits. He likes first person shooter, sports, and car racing computer games. He also watches some movies and TV shows I think are “too violent”. He’s not a bad guy, and you have to appreciate that I am a very sensitive person. The moment when Bambi’s mom dies in the snow is right on the edge for me. I like yoga, reading, writing, and thinking. I do yoga in the room next to the TV. And we have a cat, so closed doors are not tolerated.

So, even when I’m not in the same room, the sounds of his fun disturb me. I realize if I were enlightened, I wouldn’t notice the sniper fire during my savasana, but until I reach nirvana I require quiet to relax. His leisure pursuits give me an unwelcome background soundtrack of revving engines, squealing tires, or, worse, rat-a-tat machine gun fire and endless repetition of stock phrases. It gets to the point where I walk into the study and plead for no more “fire in the hole!”

Every so often I go on a tirade about this, and he responded by asking for some nice wireless surround sound headphones. I should feel bad about giving him something so obviously for me, but he got himself an XBox 360 for Christmas, so there really wasn’t any way I could compete. Today I had the joy of asking him to please put on his fancy new headphones so I didn’t have to partake in whatever loud thing was happening on the game console.

Wow. Silence. Imagine!