Joe Palca - Annoying

Unbelievable, it takes me 35 min to get to the car dealership, so I get there at 8:15, and [dealer] says they can’t do it in an hour or even 2. He carefully explains to me that the 10:00 coffee break and the lunch hour are sacred, you can’t even pick up a car during the lunch break. Now that I’m 15 min late I can return on Dec. 5 [a few days later] for the next available 8 a.m. appointment. So, they kindly handed me a bus pass and I’ll have to hoof it back here between 1:15 and 6:00. This shit drives me insane. No way am I ever having tires put on again. We’ll do it ourselves. I find this stuff annoying beyond belief. Sorry, there’s nothing you can do, I just have to vent.

If there’s a saving grace about the persnicketyness of the Swiss way of doing things, it’s that at least in Switzerland the rules can be articulated, and in some cases, they are even explicitly codified. That’s rarely the case for social norms.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall has made a study of social norms, beginning in World War II, when he spent time in Europe and the Philippines, and later when he was involved in training people for foreign service. In his 1966 book The Hidden Dimension , Hall describes his theory of “proxemics.” {43} 43 6. Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). As Levine argues for time, Hall argues that culture shapes our perception of physical space—and who belongs in it. In every culture, only the closest friends and associates are allowed into our intimate space. There’s a different comfort boundary for people we deal with in a social setting and yet another for people we interact with in a public setting. People who cross those boundaries are annoying. Yet so, too, is figuring out where those boundaries are in an unfamiliar country.

“A very good example is that a lot of Middle Easterners like to stand closer to people than we do in our Western culture,” says Phoebe Ellsworth. “So, if you’re at a party with someone who has a different sense of what the right distance to stand away is when you’re talking to somebody, and he is too close, he can seem to us overbearing.”

The consequences of these space violations can be amusing. “You frequently see an American take a step back,” says Ellsworth, “and the Middle Easterner will take a step forward so he can get closer to his comfortable distance. They go around and around the room like that.” It’s like a dance.

In public places, where the interaction is not as close and personal, the need for space still exists. Elliot Aronson is a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He says that Greeks and Americans have very different ideas about how to distribute themselves on an empty stretch of beach. “On an American beach,” says Aronson, “three people arrive and sit as far away from one another as they can. As more people arrive, they fill in, leaving space between strangers. On a Greek beach, three people arrive and immediately sit close together. You can see how Americans would be annoyed by a family of Greeks setting their towels down right next to them with ‘room’ available!”

There are also very different norms about whether you should look people in the eye, according to Ellsworth. “We think that it’s the right thing to do,” she says. “We take it as a sign of sincerity; we assume that if somebody is not looking us in the eye, maybe the person is lying. Yet many other cultures think it’s rude to look somebody right in the eye.”

She has observed this with many of her foreign students at the University of Michigan. Some of them have described to her the experience of driving a car and having their passengers try to make eye contact with them. She says they find it not only annoying but downright scary.

Ellsworth says that significant consequences can result from this cultural misunderstanding. A foreign visitor’s discomfort with making eye contact with an immigration official or a security officer could arouse suspicion in an official who is untrained in these cultural norms.

Ellsworth has been trying to find out when these patterns of behavior emerge. She has begun a comparative analysis of American and Japanese children’s books. As you might expect, the American books tell stories of individuals triumphing over adversity, whereas Japanese stories are more about fitting in and getting along. Ellsworth doubts that these patterns of behavior are something we’re born with—she thinks it must be the result of early childhood experiences.

So, if we Americans as a culture have a narcissistic, self-assured swagger as we strut through the world, and if we are annoyed when our will is thwarted and events we can’t control drive us nuts, we come by these attitudes honestly. Like so many of life’s woes (and joys), it’s all our parents’ fault.

Chris Furbee spent most of his childhood in Philippi, a town on the banks of the Tygart River in central West Virginia. After Chris’s parents got divorced, his mother couldn’t afford their house in nearby Lake Floyd, so Chris and his mom moved into his grandparents’ trailer in Philippi.

Quarters were tight. Chris remembers slinking past his grandfather as the old man lurched down the narrow hallways. “He’d lose balance and bump into me occasionally,” Chris says. “I had a real hard time with it. I hate to say that, but I was a teenager. I felt like it was almost like he had a contagious disease.” Chris’s grandfather did have a disease, but it wasn’t contagious: he was dying of Huntington’s disease (HD).

The lurching is a symptom of the illness, caused by the degeneration of the brain, particularly the basal ganglia, which plays a role in motor function. The movement tics are called chorea , the Greek word for “dance,” but it looks more like a marionette show. Imagine an invisible hand rhythmically pulling your limbs, your head, and even your tongue in different directions. That’s chorea. The tics are involuntary. They don’t hurt—until the end of the day, when your muscles ache from the constant motion.

Losing control of your muscles is only one symptom of Huntington’s disease. You also slowly lose your mind: HD patients have difficulty recollecting words, reading emotions in others, learning new things, and remembering old information. Yet these symptoms appear later. Early on—even before the chorea—researchers have found that the symptoms are often more subtle personality changes. One hallmark of the early disease is a feeling of being uncontrollably annoyed.

Although the symptom is defined as irritability, there is no standard clinical definition of the term. Irritability has been largely neglected by psychiatry, according to neuropsychiatrist David Craufurd of the University of Manchester School of Medicine in the United Kingdom. It’s not particularly well studied, well measured, or even well defined. Although irritability is a symptom of other mental illnesses—Tourette’s syndrome, autism, and personality disorders—Huntington’s disease is one of the few illnesses in which the behavior has been systematically studied.

Understanding the brain changes that occur in Huntington’s patients may reveal something about what triggers people to become annoyed and why some people are more prone than others to be irritable.

For healthy people, irritability could be thought of as a person’s propensity to get annoyed. Craufurd, who has thought about irritability in Huntington’s patients perhaps as much as anyone, says, “In common parlance in England, we say that somebody has a short fuse. Irritability is the length of your fuse, so to speak.”

Another way to think about a short fuse, says Kevin Craig, a psychiatrist based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, is as a lens or a mood. Craig distinguishes emotions from moods. “The idea is that emotions have an object. So, if you’re annoyed or surprised or disgusted, it’s always at something or about something that’s external to yourself.” Surprise, happiness, and anger are emotions. The feeling of being annoyed might fit into the emotion category—it’s often short-lived and prompted by something external. “Whereas with moods, it’s more like a lens or a filter,” Craig says.