You Down With HSP? (Yeah, You Know Me)

Once I actually bought a book called "The Highly Sensitive Person." It might as well have been called "You're Quite the Asshole." 251 pages detailing people who are easily overwhelmed by stimuli, people who are overly affected by other people's moods, people who are easily startled. In other words: people who ask the manager at Pasta Pomodoro to turn down that god-awful music because they don't amore it... People who make their friend duct tape a new baby blanket to the kitchen window so she can spend the night on her couch without the INS-glare of the street light outside... People who call the cops on the old lady across the street because that stupid white dog with the weepy brown eyes won't stop yapping and yes I know it would have been nice to ask her first like a good neighbor but what am I, fucking State Farm? No, no I am not, and the cops are there for a reason, god how I hate confrontation. I am a Highly Sensitive Person, HSP for short, or, if you prefer: an ASS (Ack! Stop [the {motherfucking}] Stimuli!).

I inherited my HSPness from my dad. I grew up climbing over the carseat into the way, way back of his 1972 International Scout, a book of matches in hand, with the explicit instructions not to sit back down until I had located the source of that rattle and wedged the matches into the crevice to make it stop, make it stop, oh for the love of god, make it stop! My father now wears a hearing aid. Dad, do you need a refill on your juice? I ask each week when he comes over for dinner. No, I haven't seen that movie yet, he might reply, what's it about? Depending on my mood I sometimes make it up, a plot, something to do with a falcon and a farm, fuhfuh mmm, kah plahst, numnumaghhh, you know. Yeah. From across the room my cell phone sometimes emits a high-pitched sigh of interference, the ghost in the machine whispering to the toaster, a secret that we are not supposed to hear, and my dad and I look at each other. Did you hear that? I ask. God, yes, he says, turning down his hearing aid, I heard that. I hate that.

This is my birthright, to spend my life consumed by the brightness of the numbers on my clock radio. Bryan says I sleep with my eyes open. He also tells me to stop giving people the stink eye at movie theaters, on airplanes, in restaurants. He says my muscle to pissiness ratio is way off, and something tells me he doesn't always have my back when people are talking too loudly. Why must people talk so loudly?

Apparently I have the hearing of a teenager, which might make me feel good if I aspired to be a teenager which I don't, what with the way benzoyl peroxide bleaches a perfectly good towel. Used as a deterrant for loitering teens in Britain, this high-pitched tone is such that only people under the age of 25 can hear it. I am 11 years older, but I can hear it, and something tells me that my dad, at 66, will be able to hear it, too. Check it out to see if you are also an asshole, like me:

Of course if you also hear a small voice telling you to burn down the school and break into all the lockers then you're not just an asshole, you're a dick. And crazy. And not very sensitive at all.

Now sshhhh. I'm trying to think over here.