I hate phone calls, so I believe in a telephone armistice. To me, the idea of calling someone unprompted is basically saying, 'Hey, stop whatever you're doing and talk to me right now.' If you find yourself in the middle of something, getting an unprompted annoyance is incredibly frustrating.
When I'm painting and in the zone, it's difficult for me to stop. It can take me half a day to get into that space, and once I do, I only talk to a certain few people who won't disrupt it. Home to sleep and back at it, nothing else outside of getting food. Everything else is an annoyance getting in my way.
I like collecting things, much to my wife's annoyance. I keep mementoes because I'm proud of all the things I've done, but also to remind myself, when I'm having a difficult time at home, that there are always tougher, harder things to get through in life.
I myself have raised plenty of questions about Sarah Palin, much to the annoyance of the McCain campaign. But those questions have been about her qualifications and experience, never her appearance.
I grew up in Edinburgh, but my dad's from Glasgow, and my mum's from Chingford in Essex, and I spent time in Ireland, too, so I was always somebody who absorbed accents. I would come back from visits, very much to the annoyance of friends and family, with an accent based on where I'd been.
When daughters react with annoyance or even anger at the smallest, seemingly innocent remarks, mothers get the feeling that talking to their daughters can be like walking on eggshells: they have to watch every word.
Everything we say has metamessages indicating how our words are to be interpreted: Is this a serious statement or a joke? Does it show annoyance or goodwill? Most of the time, metamessages are communicated and interpreted without notice because, as far as anyone can tell, the speaker and the hearer agree on their meaning.
I'm intensely private, and I've openly shown annoyance at the paparazzi.
I don't stay in my trailer. I like to sit in video village, probably to the annoyance of some producers and directors, because they really love to talk about actors, and they can't in front of me.
The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.
