Róisín Ingle on ... irritation once again

Years ago I lived with a woman in a flatmate situation. I thought it was going to be loads of fun. I thought we'd call each other "roomies" and braid each other's hair late into the night while watching Friends. As it turned out it was just painful. It wasn't her, though – it was me.

Every day I’d come home from work and she’d ask me, “How was your day?” or some variation on that question. And the question began to drive me up the wall. I started to anticipate the shape of the words on her mouth as I turned the key in the lock. I’d spend the walk home thinking of ways to answer. Satisfactory answers, breezy and civil and yet making it clear I didn’t want any further chat about “my day”.

What was my problem? Well, I didn’t want to come home from work and be forced to immediately dissect the previous seven hours. I didn’t want to have to think about anything. I wanted peace and quiet. I wanted to be a alone with my thoughts and to not have to say anything for as long as I pleased. God, I was an irritable young one back then. Can’t say much has changed.

In the past few days I’ve been irritated by so many things, none of them significant in the larger scheme of things. I had to sit beside someone on a bus for two hours. That was irritating enough without the fact that she was chewing gum the whole time. Normally, if someone is chewing gum I can remove myself from their masticating orbit but I was stuck on a window seat wondering why chewing gum isn’t a banned substance and also wondering if people knew how awful us non-gum-chewing people think their gum habit is, whether they would do it at all. But maybe that’s just me.

Then another day I was irritated by some loud-speaking people. Okay, loud-speaking men. Men who although standing very close to each other felt the need to speak as though they were several metres apart. Men shouting at each other and laughing loudly at each other’s jokes.

When I mentioned my irritation at the loudness, apologising profusely for my sexism, to another man while also hypocritically referencing my own tendency to loudness, he said he knew exactly what I meant. He generally shied away from that kind of man-on-man action himself, he confided. He went even further saying he operated the opposite way. He was the kind of man, he said, who tried to take up less space and make the smallest amount of noise possible. His emotional honesty was endearing. It took the heat out of my irritation. But then he took out a packet of chewing gum – seriously – and ruined it all.

And then I went into Tiger on Halloween Saturday to get some more spooky paraphernalia only to find there was no more sign of Halloween and the whole place was stocked with Santas and Christmas doodahs. Even my children were perplexed and, I couldn’t help notice, a little bit irritated. And then on the radio someone was talking about how there are only seven Mondays until Christmas. So annoying. Also, people keep Skyping me and insisting I turn on the video function when I am in bed with jam stains on my cheeks. For decades we talked on the phone without seeing the other person, but now pictures with the sounds are somehow essential? Give me a break.

I was sent a brilliant book the other day called The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith. It's an Encyclopaedia of Feeling "from anger to wanderlust". She has dissected 150 emotions and of course I went straight to the "i" section to see if irritation was there. It was! Although it wasn't at all gratifying to see that the Victorians saw a tendency to be easily irritated as "the mark of weakness". Or that irritation was deemed the curse of the congenitally oversensitive, "alcoholics, the insane, artists and dandies".

I am facing facts. I am easily frayed at the edges, annoyed, het up. Easily pleased too, though. A friend telling me about going up to see the deer in Phoenix Park snapped me out of my irritable mire. As he enthused about the experience, it took me right out of my oversensitive slump.

The deer are mating now, he explained, so the herds are hanging around in one group, and it’s something special to see them up close, so many of them. There’s a sign there that says “Please do not feed the deer or touch them” or some variation of this. And yet, he said, there are families all around feeding and touching the deer to beat the band. So irritating when you think about it. But, yeah, that’s probably just me.

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]