DIANA REPUBLIC

I am not normally a nag. I am a lot of other things: impatient, moody and sometimes an all around pain in the ass, but not a nag. After months and months of listening to the television on volumes meant for sports bars not homes, however, I started to nag. Bob claimed that at normal volumes everyone on TV mumbled, despite the fact that I could recite the dialogue verbatim. At one point he complained that the refrigerator was too loud and drowning out the television. So I bought a new fridge. (OK, so I worked that angle to my advantage.) The commercials are even louder than the programming so at his preferred volume we found ourselves yelling to speak to one another.

Our everyday communication began to suffer as well.

Me: “Oh you know her. She loves bad boys.”

Bob: “Bat boys? Really?”

Me: “Yes, that is what I said. My thirty six year-old girlfriend has a a big thing for the twelve year-old boys who chase the bats at Wrigley Field.” (Another thing that I can be other than naggy is sarcastic.)

My aunt, God love her, who is hard of hearing herself, gave Bob a pair of cordless headphones for Christmas. These have been a gift for us both. Watching television together became more tolerable, but conversation came to a stand still. When he had to remove the headphones each time I had a thought (which of course I had to share) it became annoying.

In any event, the nagging commenced. I rode him like a very crabby cowgirl to get his hearing checked. He was resistant in part because his brother suffers from hearing loss and wears hearing aids. His brother was also in a band, I reminded him. And todays’ hearing aids, have you seen them?  They are next to invisible.

Bob finally acquiesced and had his hearing tested. Great right? The results: he has almost no hearing loss except in the higher pitches that would be – like – oh – WOMENS’ VOICES.

So let’s see how this worked out for me:

1. The volume on the television doesn’t change.
2. I am proven wrong – a very irritating conclusion.
3. Bob now has a doctor’s note to ignore me
4. All of the above was due to my nagging.

Bob: 1

Diana: 0